


Dead Soldiers: An Oral History of the End Times

by girl_wonder



Category: Supernatural
Genre: POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-28
Updated: 2011-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-19 20:46:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 43,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girl_wonder/pseuds/girl_wonder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Although much has been written about the sociological and theological importance of the "End Times War", there has been much less written about the individuals directly involved. Using interviews with primary sources, this paper seeks to examine how Dean and Sam Winchester, two criminals with a history of violence and petty theft, became commonly known as a prophet of the Lord and the Anti-Christ.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dead Soldiers: An Oral History of the End Times

**Author's Note:**

> There are so many people I'd really like to thank here. [info]innie_darling who was key in making this both readable and good, I owe you many many thanks for this. You are beyond awesome, you go into realms of awesome previously undiscovered. [info]annaalamode who was the best critical cheerleader EVER. <3 [info]tassosss who read, commented and made me like this fic when I'd gotten to the point where I didn't want to read it, look at it or think about it any more. [info]varadia who did an emergency CPR maneuver on the summary, making it both grammatically correct and more interesting. [info]nebst for the amazing, brilliant art. Much, much thanks. There are also a lot of people who I've tortured with parts of this over the past few months. Not to sound all Celine Dion, but to you, I'm thankful.

**Fic title:** Dead Soldiers: An Oral History of the End Times  
 **Author name:** fryadvocate  
 **Artist name:** Sabeth (  
 **Genre:** Gen  
 **Rating:** R (for language)  
 **Word count:** 43,400  
 **Warnings/Spoilers:** Religion, miracles, angels, demons, and the end times.  
 **Summary:** Although much has been written about the sociological and theological importance of the "End Times War", there has been much less written about the individuals directly involved. Using interviews with primary sources, this paper seeks to examine how Dean and Sam Winchester, two criminals with a history of violence and petty theft, became commonly knows as a prophet of the Lord and the Anti-Christ.  
 **Link to fic:**  
 **Link to art:** [Art is here](http://nebst.livejournal.com/41137.html)

 **Introduction:**

In 2007, Columbia University released a study that indicated approximately 35% of Americans believed in demons, 60% believed in Heaven, and 40% believed in angels. Two years later, Columbia University released a similar study showing that 90% of Americans believed in Heaven, 95% believed in angels, and 95% believed in demons. During the four years I taught a course in modern history at New York University, I used the results of these two studies to show how a religious uprising of a specific faith can affect the entirety of a culture.

In my class, we discussed how "demon hunts," a fragile economy, and a religious revival centered around Sam and Dean Winchester had combined to create an event colloquially known as the "End Times War."

In the spring of 2015, as I finished my lecture series on the effects that the "End Times War" had on our culture, I once again quoted the statistic about Americans almost uniformly believing in angels and demons. I acknowledged that most modern scholars see this as evidence of groupthink and public hysteria since so many believers admitted to having never seen either angel or demon. However, the near consensus in modern academics did not necessarily indicate that their findings were “the truth”; there was always work to be done.

After that class, one of my students approached me and stated that she believed in demons because her mother had been possessed.

This bold statement challenged much of the recanted testimony of many prisoners who had claimed to be possessed. Notably, after undergoing psychiatric treatment, Tina Ryder, famous for her participation in the April Attacks, denied that she had ever been possessed by a demon. In order to more fully understand what life had been like in the sort of environment that created a feeling of demonic possession, I requested an interview with my student's mother.

At our first meeting, Sarah X agreed to talk only with the promise of anonymity. When she began her story, I realized that for all of the documentation of events and facts about the "End Times War," there was too much missing from an anthropological standpoint; we did not have any collections of interviews or oral histories, studies of the effects of the "End Times War" on specific churches or sects, or an ethnography of the unique culture that existed in Las Cruces during the revival of Glory Church.

Most notably, the widely accepted perspective of Sam and Dean Winchester, the two key figures of the "End Times War," was that of the FBI. The Winchester brothers’ histories were distorted by the events that they precipitated, and there was little documentation of their private lives. They were, in fact, most often grouped with the soldiers that died during the "End Times War," despite the fact that that association was only a brief part of their involvement with the events.

Sarah X's story touched on much that had been recorded about the "End Times War" but from an entirely new viewpoint. As a primary source, she was invaluable. I began researching to see if anyone had recorded any other oral histories of the period. When I realized that no one had, I began recording them for my own studies. The most pressing concern was to record these stories before the immediacy faded, or the sources passed away. As I recorded each story, I began to form a more coherent narrative that fit (and in some cases, distinctly did not fit) with historical record.

Dean and Sam became different people in these narratives. The accepted version of their history was called into question by first person accounts of several sources. Moreover, it became apparent that grouping them with the soldiers they commanded was problematic as it covered only a small period of their involvement with the "End Times War."

In recording these stories and writing this paper, I sought to create some complexity in the historical narrative. These testimonies reveal the war as more than public hysteria and the Winchesters as more than dead soldiers.

 

 **Chapter 1: Before the End**

 

 _Joanna Beth Harvelle:_

I met the Winchester boys sometime in 2006? Maybe 2007. It's hard to remember now because a lot happened around that time.

I mean, I know a lot of people want me to say that as soon as I met them, I knew what was up, who was who, but the world just doesn't work like that, and my mom always says that you can't make a judgment too early.

But, yeah, soon's I met them, I knew I liked Dean. Who wouldn't? And back then, really the only men I knew were drunk farm boys that came in to shoot the shit and act like big men. The two of them were a breath of fresh air. A coupla hunters that weren't old enough to be my daddy? Sign me up for that.

 _Jim Novak:_

Castiel used to say, "In all of time there were only two like them. Although, some of the host believe the sons of Eve were similar."

 _[pause]_

I don't know if I believe that. To me, they were always more David and Jonathan, loving and fighting, together until the end.

 _Robert Singer:_

You hear a lot of stories about John, and don't get me wrong here, the man could hunt and he was a pretty decent person when it came down to the line. He was just a shit-for-brains father. Ain't nothing more to it than that. The way those boys grew up was Hell on the both of 'em, but I used to think they weren't too bad for it. They both seemed alright.

Bit funny in the head about each other, and you'd swear that Dean couldn't live without his brother. Sam, though. When Dean died, it wasn't right. Just wasn't right. He looked about like you'd expect. A little more serious, a little more like maybe the last good thing in the world had been taken away.

If I had to say, it wasn't that that made him like he is. No, it was something else, something no one ever knew about. You don't just go from college kid to antichrist. Not like that.

Dean, it did happen like that. Just like that. One week I was talking to this boy who'd sold his own soul to save his brother, a few months later, he comes back from Hell a person I didn't know.

It was hard to tell how exactly. Subtle things. Little stuff. The drinking, that stare. Hell, the angels were a pretty big sign.

 _Ruby:_

You've probably already talked to Jo and Bobby. I think everyone that knew them from before is dead. So, let me just say this. Straight out.

John Winchester was a shitty father. I can't think of a single way he could have been a worse father. No, really.

I mean, I know demons that pretended to be better parents than he was.

You want to know why one of his kids is the 'antichrist' and the other is, well, _Dean_? I'll give you a hint. Two words. The first one is 'John', the second ends in '-chester.' It isn't all demon blood and destiny. Sometimes it's just that Daddy taught you how to use a shotgun and didn't teach you how to ride a bike.

 _Joanna Beth Harvelle:_

A story about the two of them? Yeah, I've got one. I was on a hunt, this house... apartment building in the middle of a city. A girl disappears from inside her own locked apartment. Lots of things could do that. A golem, for one.

Ran into one of those in Texas, nearly folded me in half.

When I caught up with them, Dean and Sam wanted to send me back to my mom, because they were... well, she was... Look, I couldn't even date until I went away to college. Hunters were _scared_ of my mom.

But I told them no can do, so we were hunting this thing. It was sick: the ghost had built torture chambers into his walls when he was alive, and now that he was dead he was dragging girls – blonde girls – into these pipes under the building.

I got taken and I thought that I'd be brave but all I could really think about was how grateful I was that the Winchesters were out there. You know what they say about Winchesters. Always get their ghost.

After they'd rescued me, they needed to tempt the ghost out. Here's what I remember, and out of that whole horrible evening, this is what I think of. Someone said that they needed bait, and both Dean and Sam looked at me like I was just that. Bait. Shark chum.

I think maybe that's when I fell out of love with him. Dean, I mean. Right when I figured out that there wasn't ever going to be a Mrs. Dean Winchester. Just the girl who didn't get killed.

You should talk to Bobby, though. He'd know better what they were like when they were learning to hunt.

 _Robert Singer:_

Dean was twelve maybe? Thirteen on the outside. He called me up one day, completely out of the blue and says that his dad had been gone for nearly two weeks and Dean had run out of food.

I think he wanted me to wire him a loan. But I knew if I did that I'd never get that money back because there wasn't a loan John Winchester hadn't squirreled his way out of, and also those boys would still be stuck in a rent-by-the-hour motel in Chicago.

When I get to their room, after driving nearly twelve hours, Dean near takes my head off with a shotgun. Thing was loaded with buckshot. Boy makes me take a nice long swig of holy water – don't know if he knew what it was, just made me take a drink. Then he asks me all these questions about silver eyes and shedding skin.

 _That's_ how I find out that their daddy was after a shape-shifter.

 _So, I got inside that room, packed up as much as I could and put the boys in my truck. Sam was young. Seven or eight, and he was so afraid of me, 'cause he knew I was pissed at his daddy. He was real quiet and just when I started to feel pretty shitty, Dean pulls out this ragged old kids' book and starts reading to him._

 _Damned if he didn't know that kid better than a mother. He and Sam were really good the whole way to Blue Earth. I dropped 'em off with Jim Murphy, this old pastor I used to know._

 _About two weeks later, John calls me, ready to come down to South Dakota and kill me himself. That man had a temper you wouldn't believe. I told him where his kids were and warned him that he better not leave 'em like that again, no matter how good Dean was with a shotgun._

 _Didn't hear a lot from them after that. Maybe John got the message, maybe the boys just stopped wanting help from anyone._

 _  
_Miranda Reyes:_   
_

I'll be honest, I didn't know anything about the Winchesters until the first story I did for CNN. I got a hold of their FBI file through some contacts of mine and it's messy stuff.

The Winchesters kept moving, and finding new schools. Social services was called a shocking number of times. Even with all the uprooting they did, I still don’t know how they managed to stay ahead of CPS.

 _Mike Guenther:_

John and Mary were really sweet folks when you got to know them. First time I met her, Mary seemed like one of those pretty girls that've had some bad things happen to her. I said so to my wife, and we both thought that maybe John'd taken her out of somewhere she didn't want to be, you know? Because she was so young, and John was such a nice kid.

Everyone knew Sam Campbell was kind of odd – if he'd been alive now they'd call the cops on him because every now and then you'd see his wife with some funny bruises. Mary used to have those, too.

Back then, though, what happened in your house was your own business. That's what everyone used to think. Not just me, everyone. Who knows what was going on, and I just went to my job every morning, we said hello on Sundays.

But then Sam Campbell died and everyone kind of thought... well, me and Carol thought it was probably for the best. That maybe John had caught him doing something he shouldn't to his daughter and... made sure that Mary was safe.

Because she loved John. Boy, did she love him. She used to smile whenever she saw him, her whole face would just light up.

Her older kid – Dean – he used to smile like that when he was a baby.

Anyway, she got some inheritance money from both of her parents' insurance, and she married John pretty quick. Over at John's church, they thought it was because there was a bun in the oven, if you know what I mean. But, nine months later, it's just the two of them.

I was trying to find a partner for this garage, and John's father asked me if I would take him on, if John had the money to make partner. I thought the money would come from John's parents, a little bit of a wedding present, but it was Mary's name on the check. I think she always did have a better head for that sort of thing than John.

For the first couple of years, they lived out of this little tiny apartment. You wouldn't believe how small it was. They'd spent all of their savings and her inheritance on his buy-in to the partnership, but then business picked up and John got a little faster at his work.

It was just like him to work at something 'til he got it right. He worked on cars until I think he was even better than I was at brakes, and he could do oil changes in his sleep.

Mary used to bring Dean by when John took his lunch, the two of them were like teenagers still. Here they'd been married almost seven years and they were still making each other laugh.

My wife used to bring them food when they were first starting out, because apparently Mary couldn't cook anything. Nearly killed John a couple of times, food poisoning.

But he loved her, and she loved him.

Don't know what they'd think of how their boys turned out.

 

 **Chapter 2: When It Began**

 _Joanna Beth Harvelle:_

The world was a really scary place back then. It's hard to remember because things are so different now, but there was this time when all you'd hear on the news was about financial stuff falling in on itself.

I used to help my mom do the taxes on the Roadhouse, so I know a little about money, but this was like some kind of apocalypse that no one could fight. Everyone was so scared that they'd get hit next by this money thing.

The Winchesters had shown me how to steal a credit card and I'd been living on that for a while, but when the whole financial mess started, I couldn't get a new one, so I went back to working. I worked at this little shithole of a bar. It might not even be standing anymore, after the... you know. The explosions.

Anyway, it was pretty scary. If you had a job, you were happy, and you were damn well staying put.

There was all this politics going on, you know, with the wars and the new president. It was... it was really different.

 _Miranda Reyes:_

In late 2008, there was a lot going on with the economy. Essentially, everyone thought that the sky was falling.

... you know what I mean, right? Chicken Little? Help, help, the sky is falling?

Things just began collapsing: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were both bought by the government, Lehman went broke, AIG was bailed out, Washington Mutual – a bank – went bankrupt. When all that's happening, you know there are things that are seriously wrong. There was this fund, TARP, and it was disappearing. Billions of dollars! Disappearing. And no one knew where exactly it was going.

What it came down to, really, was credit. Everyone called it the credit crisis, and all I could think was that credit is _imaginary money_. How could we have let it get this bad?

Christmas that year was pretty sad: everyone cut back, which only hurt the economy more. And everyone wanted a piece of TARP. The banks, the credit market, the car industry, I think even Target was asking for some.

At the time, I covered international news for CNN. That's how I met Jackson and Tom, actually. CNN sent me into Iraq to do a story on the rebuilding effort and the two of them were the Marines they'd assigned to me and my camera man. It was a good story, we had some good footage, and I wanted to go back abroad. Everyone said that was how you got ahead. You did the stories people watched.

So, I knew about the problems with the economy, but I didn't know everything. I was international news, not business. Even when I worked for the _Times_ , I covered California politics, not Wall Street.

No one really liked us very much. Americans in Iraq, I mean. I got called back and they sent this other guy, Daniel, to do the story that _I'd_ done all the footwork for. I was really, really pissed. Instead I did a couple of talking-point pieces about the economy. You know, those ones with a nearly empty shopping mall in the background that were supposed to scare everyone back into buying.

In the end... If I could have it to do all over again, I'd still be pissed about being pulled from Iraq. But...

If I'd gone to Baghdad, I'd never have been sent to do the New Mexico story.

 _Jim Novak:_

I was possessed by an angel. So, I didn't... So, what was happening in the real world didn't touch me that much. Castiel was mostly concerned with the war, and not the one in Iraq. Because he'd been through it before. He knew the... drill.

There were seals all over, and this demon named Lilith had to break sixty-six of them so that she could free... the devil. Castiel wouldn't say so, he'd never say so, but he hadn't heard God for a long time. Even Gabriel hadn't heard any orders.

I don't want... A lot of things from that time are missing. I just don't remember them.

And what I do remember is... bloody. A lot of it's bloody. Angels don't get tired, they don't get hungry, they don't get _anything_ , they don't have any human weaknesses, but they were still ending up dead. They were losing a lot of the host.

Uriel used to say... he used to say that, "Humans were given free will so that they can be the most imperfect creatures in creation." But Heaven was losing, and right then, Dean spoke to his true nature. To the nature that God gave him.

 _Robert Singer:_

As far as the boys and I could tell, it was all-out war from both sides. I was going state to state, practically door to door, trying to get all of the hunters on our side. The ones that were left after the Raising of the Witnesses. That was what we'd decided early on. I think Gordon Walker taught the boys one thing.

You do _not_ want to be on the other end of a hunter's shotgun, not when you're already fighting on two fronts.

Especially when one of those fronts was Hell and the other was Heaven.

A lot of the guys I talked to were pretty sure about their stance on the whole thing once I explained. I talked to a few who were sitting on the fence, not sure about the Winchester boys. Pete Osgood, used to do some hunting in Florida, he said that he didn't trust John, but his boys hadn't done Pete a lick of wrong.

I thought it meant he'd fight on our side until I realized it just meant that Pete didn't want to get involved.

Then there was Cal Philips in Pennsylvania, this hunter who'd probably been doing it a lot longer than I had, and he said that he'd shoot his own dog before he listened to angels. Said they were nothing but cosmic bullies, worse than demons.

Cal died, you know, pretty soon after it began. Heard he went out fighting, the bastard.

Most everyone else, though, was happy to hear some explanation about what was going on. Because even weekend hunters, those fools with camouflage gear in their closets and a whole lotta firepower that no decent hunter would use, even they'd noticed that the hunts were more intense. There was more going on.

How all the civilians convinced themselves it was situation normal is beyond me. I remember doing at least a dozen salt 'n' burns a month for a while. And the weather was actin' up all the time.

I guess they thought that it was global warming. Idjits.

It wasn't pretty for a while there. Half the hunters I talked to thought it must have been Sam that opened the gate again to drag Dean out of Hell, the other half thought I'd let Sam raise a zombie.

But the thing is, it's pretty easy to get everyone working together when I told 'em about the seals. Even the holdouts thought that Sam and Dean were small potatoes compared to the Morningstar.

Now I know a couple of guys that want to kick my ass for convincing them that Dean and Sam weren't the big picture. Back then I _believed_ it, too. That the boys weren't half as important as Lilith and the angels. Now...

Well, the idea was that all of the hunters would be on the lookout for demonic activity in their area. Stop Lilith from breaking a seal if they could, but mostly just get everything ready to protect people if the angels lost. There's still a few counties protected by some pretty heavy traps and hoodoo.

That's how the resistance was getting away with it. Those hunters that were too good at their jobs. Can't say I'm a bit sorry about it.

 _Pete Osgood:_

I started hunting after I almost got eaten by a skinwalker at summer camp. I think the first thing you realize about hunting is that it's a solitary sport. It's not a team effort, and it's definitely not like deer hunting, where you go out with some buddies and a six pack and come back with venison.

Information was something that just kind of permeated, I remember that. Kind of miss it. I'd hear about something from the guy I bought silver bullets from, and he'd have heard about it from someone else, et cetera. You know.

Of course I knew about John Winchester, ’cause after what went down with Harvelle, everyone knew about him. But he didn't come far enough south, so I never met him. I heard about his boys... when was it? Sometime in early 2004. The demon John was after was a pretty big deal.

Most hunters don't like a lot of attention. No muss, no fuss type of thing. But the demon kids, we all heard about them. Gordon Walker was crazy when it came to them. I got the warning and kept an eye out.

I didn't even think anyone knew how to find me, but then Bobby Singer showed up at my door in late '08. It was after that ghost of a kid I hadn't rescued tried to hack my head off with an axe.

 _[pause as PO coughs]_

I'm sorry. I haven't thought about that in a while. I knew it was something hinky at the time, because there hadn't been enough of that boy left for a haunting. I just tried to talk him down, and when that didn't work, some iron shot did the trick.

Eventually, he disappeared and I made some calls, found out that someone had been Raising the Witnesses. Things got really bad for a while. I'm talking about demon possessions in the supermarket, stuff that wouldn't have happened back when I first started hunting.

Bobby came through not that long after.

Looking back at it, I feel like an idiot, but all I could think about was where my next paycheck was coming from. It wasn't a great economy to be taking a few days off to go hunting. And Bobby's story was pretty out there.

I knew some exorcisms, but finding out that there's a war with Heaven going on? Please. It's not something that I could believe. It's dangerous to say now, but I'm still not quite convinced.

And Bobby wasn't that convincing. Maybe if he hadn’t been so gung-ho for the Winchesters, he might’ve had me. His argument was... let me try to remember how he said it. We were sitting in my living room because only a dumb kid would give away the home court advantage.

He had this whole speech ready about the war. According to him, there were these locks between Hell and Earth that kept Lucifer in and some demon was going around breaking them. I know that scared the living crap out of me, but... really, what the hell was I supposed to do about it?

But what he was really gunning for was for some support for the Winchesters. He had this whole idea that the Winchesters were doing good work. He kept saying something about how the Winchesters were the only ones out there fighting for humans, that they were the only ones who cared about Earth in this Heaven versus Hell, WWE RAW match.

He was laying it on pretty thick, to be honest. That was what made me take a step back. I didn't sign up to be a hunter, I just wanted to make sure that no other kid was killed at summer camp. So I said thanks but no thanks.

For a while I didn't hear anything, and then New Mexico happened and I thought about what Bobby'd said, and I started – well, I started building traps around my house. Giant steel Devil's Traps, salt circles buried in the ground. Because, after that, what the hell else was I supposed to do?

 _Reverend Doctor Scott Harrell:_

It was hard times. It was hard times for everyone, for every walk of life, for every person in our country. Men were losing their jobs, kids were being shipped overseas to fight in a war our country didn't believe in anymore, our nation was lost.

It was hard times.

I knew, I knew in my gut what I'd been preaching was true: we were fighting a war so much bigger than the one we were fighting in the holy land. But it wasn't time yet, oh, no, it was not time yet for us to take up arms.

The hard economic times made church membership go up, but most of the new members weren't saved yet, they hadn't been reborn into Christ's love. It was all lip service, it was all fear. Fear of men and women. Fear of the physical, of the financial. It wasn't true belief.

Proverbs 1 warns us to listen, listen only to God's word. He warns us right there in Scripture that you can't let just anything into your ears, you have to sit, stand, _walk_ knowing God's words.

All this fear, all this evil in the world, it was enough to scare people back towards the path. And I tried to be a good shepherd, and teach my flock of God's love, and God's word.

But it wasn't enough.

Everyone needed to be touched, because I knew, I knew that everyone needed to be saved before the end. Before Jesus himself came back and _changed_ all of his faithful.

I knew that God would save our country from the mess we'd made of it, that God was fighting for us, that He'd show all of humanity a sign to the path of Christ.

 _Ruby:_

Look, it was a war. And it wasn't a pretty war with matching uniforms and bugle horns. It was a war of attrition, each side just trying to wear the other side down.

Lilith was taking out angels one by one. _Angels_ for fuck's sake. And they were burning up demons like it was a barbeque.

 _I was running. Sam and Dean were acting like giant targets for both sides, not to mention Castiel and Uriel creeped me the fuck out. It was their eyes, how completely sad their eyes were._

 _No. Sad's not the right word for it. It was like, they were always just so _sorry_ all the time, didn't matter for what, they were always just so sorry. _

'I'm an angel, and I feel so much fucking sympathy about how your shower was cold this morning.'

'I feel such pity that the diner ran out of burgers.'

'I'm so sympathetic that Earth is about to be sucked into a literal hell.'

It's like, consciously, I'm sure they knew what was going on, but everything was _sympathy_ with them and not a single bit of _empathy_. It was creepy.

I was keeping in touch with Sam all the time, because he was still the horse my money was on. But I didn't want to be nearby if the angel tag team showed up. I think Uriel would have just roasted me on the spot, fuck professional courtesy.

The thing about this war was that it was kind of complicated. On the one hand, you've got Lilith, who's a pretty big deal in the nine circles. She's like the superstar of Hell. First demon created, you know? Baby demons want to be her when they grow up.

I mean, she's twisted as fuck, but twisted is a good thing in Hell. They like twisted.

Lilith's trying to break Lucifer out of prison. And since Earth is practically Eden, Garden of, compared to Hell, I was kind of against that.

Then there's the angels trying to keep Lucifer in his prison. Supposedly.

You don't really pull out the big guns like Uriel and Castiel just for guard duty on seals. You have to want something out of the fight. You have to want to win in a way that means you don't care how many cities you have to level.

Then there's Sam, who's pumped full of demon powers that he got from Azazel – who wasn't my department, so don't ask me about him. Anyway, Azazel gave Sam these powers, but I don't think that even Azazel understood what they could do.

Because it wasn't a possession, it was like Azazel had superimposed all of _his_ powers onto Sam. Actually, more than his powers. Sam could pull a demon from its host and cast it back into the depths. Do you know how much control that takes? How much power?

That's Sam, sitting in the middle with his brother who'd just been pulled out of Hell by an angel. And I should have been able to guess that that made him something not-human too, but back then the only thing that mattered to me about Dean was how much of a wedge he could put between me and Sam.

Right then, it was like being in the middle of a battlefield. There was demons, angels, Sam, and Dean. And you couldn't tell who was fighting who or for what.

We could have been massacring our own camp, but no one could tell because we were never really sure who was on our side and who was the enemy.  
 **Chapter 3: Where It Began**

 _Robert Singer:_

It was a haunting. You know, a regular salt 'n' burn, as far as I knew. I sent 'em down that way because they were heading south to Texas just to travel, to get away from this mess of demons they'd dealt with in Minnesota. Wasn't pretty, from what I heard. A half dozen kids killed by this nasty demon named Agiel, and Dean and Sam had to exorcise at least three or four hosts before they got the sunuvabitch.

I thought maybe they could hit the haunting and get back in the swing of things. That they'd feel better once they'd taken down a ghost. I know a lot of folks think that if they'd never gone to New Mexico, if they hadn't been right there, things would have gone different, but those people don't know what it was like.

The boys needed a break from the war. I think they needed a break from themselves.

It's hard not to take yourself too seriously when you're constantly stepping in shit, and these boys were up to their eyeballs in manure. I mean, angels were telling Dean he was important, and demons were telling Sam to use his powers.

They were stretched past the point that anyone else would have broken. But they're Winchesters, and they weren't raised to break. They needed a good rest though, a chance to do something that didn't have to do with their damn destinies.

So, sure, I sent them to New Mexico, but you might as well blame Las Cruces or the weather or something else for what happened.

There was a ghost haunting an old farm in the Mesilla valley. Made a whole crop die off and then killed off the farmer and all his employees. Their priest called me and told me that it was a little beyond his expertise. Said he needed a professional and wouldn't mind paying for the services.

I knew they were heading down that way, knew they could use the money, so I gave 'em the gig. The priest's probably still around, but you never know. Las Cruces was ground zero, so nothing's certain.

 _Father Damian:_

I knew Bobby Singer because of some time he'd spent down in the Dominican, working with my aunt. He still speaks Spanish with that accent.

When Michael Castillo and his workers all died, I knew I should call him. At first the police thought it was perhaps a Satanic cult, and they asked me in to look at what had been engraved in the ground, what had been done to the bodies.

It was horrible.

Jorge, one of Michael's employees, had been baptized at our church, and he had been cut. Down the middle. All of his organs pulled out. Not pretty. My uncle used to gut pigs like that. You want to take care with the organs or the meat will go bad.

When Dean and Sam showed up, I was relieved. They were young, but you could see they were experienced, they knew what to look for.

 _Sandra Hayes:_

I've been a librarian for about 12 years, almost as long as I've been in Las Cruces. It was a nice job. We'd just received funding to help us build a new children's section, and we were going to break ground in 2009.

There were a lot of regular visitors, and we had a summer reading program. There was a book club.

At the time, I didn't think too much of Dean and Sam. They wanted back issues of the paper, and so I had to walk them over to the microfilm library. They seemed fairly nice; the taller one - Sam - he mentioned a history project they were doing and I said that we had a lot of back issues.

I had to check on the boys to make sure they weren't damaging the equipment or the film, but they were good about re-filing everything. You don't find a lot of people that are good at archiving.

I wouldn't have remembered them at all, except that they were in the news a couple of days later.

 _Father Damian:_

 _They asked me about any past deaths in the field, if we had any record of it, because there were none from the newspaper._

 _Our church didn't, but I asked Maria, who'd lived in Las Cruces longer than anyone else in the congregation and she remembered what now we'd call a Coyote that used to live in Las Cruces, a little west of the city._

 _Maria was very old, and she talked with them after Mass. I remember getting her water, because she didn't speak very much, not even in her weekly confession. I had to translate for her; she'd lived in the States for almost seventy years and she'd been alive for ninety. All the kids in her family used to call her _abuela.__

She could speak English, but I think she just didn't want to be alone with them - Sam and Dean. They looked like they knew what they were doing, but they were very... frightening, too. They were both intense in their own ways.

The story of the Coyote was that he lived in town and – do you know what a Coyote is? A smuggler. Of immigrants. And so the immigrants pay to get here and then if he thinks that he can get more money out of their families, he makes their families pay, too.

The Coyote used to keep the girls, little girls, and if their families couldn't afford to buy them back, he would kill them and dump them along the highway or in the fields. The cops caught him for bringing in migrants, but they had no evidence for the girls, so they could only put him in jail for the smuggling.

Maria said that this was maybe sixty-five years ago, because she hadn't been in the United States that long. It was a long time ago, and she didn't like talking about it.

I remember Sam reached out and held her hands and said that they'd help put the soul to rest.

I should have known -

 _[FD sighs]_

I thought that it was the Coyote's soul. I don't know why, because he hadn't died in the field. But, I thought that only evil could do evil.

 _Lauren Castillo:_

The farm used to be Michael's parents' before they died, and he worked himself to the bone for it. He wasn't one of those rich multi-million acre farmers. It was just this.

Just corn fields.

I grew up in El Paso, and I met Michael at U of Austin, and I guess he looked at me and saw something he liked. We were married for a good ten years when...

The Sheriff pulled up in front of the house, I wouldn't have been home except that Nina had the flu and I took the day off from my job in town so that I could stay home with her. The Sheriff said, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Castillo..." and I think I lost it. Screaming, crying the whole works.

How could he have died and I didn't notice? Someone driving on the road had seen the blood and I hadn't even heard...

Ten years, we'd been together. Twelve since I met him.

Shit. Sorry. I just loved him- I just _love_ him so goddamned much.

Father Damian was really good to our family when it happened. He helped me arrange the funeral, and made sure that the kids were looked after when I had to go deal with the estate and the farm. I couldn't get a farm hand on the property, not after what happened.

I remember this one day, I was out there myself, trying to get the tractor to run. I'd really lost it, because I knew that there were things I had to do before spring or we couldn't plant anything, but there weren't any workers that would come on the farm. I don't- I don't really blame them, but at the time I did. At the time I'd just lost my husband and I didn't want to lose his farm, too.

The tractor flipped off, completely lost power. I just lost it, started screaming and slamming my hands on the wheel. When I looked up, there was this little girl in the middle of the field. She couldn't have been older than Nina.

I blinked and - this is going to sound crazy - but she was right in front of me, opening her mouth, but nothing was coming out, nothing but cotton. Then, someone was grabbing me off the tractor and I heard a shotgun, right next to my ear.

It was Dean and Sam, you know, before they were _Dean and Sam_. The little girl scattered, just disappeared. They got me back to the house, and started asking me all these questions, if we'd ever seen a body, if we'd ever covered up a body.

I said that, no, no bodies ever found on our farm and _what the hell were they talking about_? I remember the last because that's when Father Damian walked in. God save me, I have the worst timing.

 _Father Damian:_

Lauren was upset. She is a strong woman, and I know it was her doing that brought Michael back to the church, but... she's a strong woman.

Despite what she'd seen, I don't think she believed in ghosts until the ninita walked through her wall. Dean held the ghost off with a shotgun, and Sam made a thick circle of salt around Lauren and her girls. They were still asking her about a body, about the girls that had been killed.

For a moment, I thought that maybe there would be no way to save the farm from the ghost.

Then Lauren remembered the graves.

 _Lauren Castillo:_

Michael's parents were buried a little ways away from the house near these old trees. He used to go down there when we'd fight. It was a nice place.

But they weren't the only graves there. I'd always thought it was Michael's grandparents buried there, or maybe the owners before his parents. Dean was refilling the shotgun and Sam had found an old iron poker we kept as decoration. Who needs a fire in New Mexico?

Sam kept asking about the walls of our house, the foundations, bodies.

Finally I told them about the three graves next to Michael's parents. Dean handed me the shotgun and said, "You know how to fire this thing?"

I'm not grateful to my dad for a lot of things, but I was pretty grateful that I knew how to shoot it. The next time I saw them, Sam had a broken arm, and there were some burning graves in my backyard.

 _Father Damian:_

Lauren wanted to drive them to the hospital, and they said, no, no, until Sam passed out.

It took two of us - Dean and me - to get Sam into the backseat of Lauren's car. Dean kept touching his brother, taking his pulse, making sure he was breathing, always reassuring himself. It was good. He loved his brother.

I think that is the beginning of faith. Love.

 _Robert Singer:_

I got a call from Damian that Sam'd broken his arm and shit if I didn't smell trouble right there. I woulda headed down right away, but I had to pick up some supplies and so I was a day late.

If you ask me, I can't even remember what the supplies were. Something that wasn't nearly as important as what happened, but there it is.

 _Lauren Castillo:_

I hadn't smoked since Nina was born because- well, cigarettes are expensive.

But I remember pulling in to the emergency entrance at the hospital, and I wanted a cigarette so bad that I almost walked across the street to buy a pack. Dean and Father Damian were trying to get Sam some help, and Nina was playing with Betty so that she wouldn't ask too many questions. Betty was so young, I think that she didn't know what was happening. After, I hoped she wouldn't remember.

Nina told her, but I didn't. I wish Nina hadn't.

Sam got in to the emergency room, and only Dean could go back with him, they just let family back there. Father Damien said that I could probably go home, that he'd stay with Dean and Sam.

I didn't really trust my house, and I think they knew it, because Dean started telling me that they'd cleared it out, cleared out the ghost, but I-

I guess I just didn't want to go back home right away. I remember I set the girls up in a corner, and Betty was climbing all over the chairs. Nina was still coughing - she'd caught a chest cold after the flu and it was painful to listen to.

We were sitting there waiting for news. They let Father Damien go in to check on the Winchesters; everyone at the hospital seemed to know him, and later I thought it must have been because he came by a lot to visit with his sick parishioners. He came back and said they were checking on Sam's head because he should have been awake by now.

 _Reverend Doctor Scott Harrell:_

There's a time in everyone's life when they hear the word of God and they listen or they ignore it. It's a choice, the choice of life as a sinner or the life of truth, the life of love, the life of belief.

God says over and over in His book, He says, "Listen! I'm speaking! I'm speaking all the time!"

And every day, so many people ignore Him, they close their ears with iPods and reality TV, they close their hearts from God. When we close our hearts and our minds to Him, sometimes God gets fed up! God says, now you better listen! You better pay attention!

Once, He flooded the whole world, wiped us all out and said, "Now, start over, do it right this time."

Once, He destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and said, "Now, don't do it again."

Once, He sent us His son, His only son, to save us and to give us the gospel.

Once, once, He sent us Dean Winchester.

 _Ruby:_

It was a hunt. It was the last hunt they ever did. I don't even know what they were hunting. A vampire nest? A demon? A ghost? It doesn't matter now.

 **Chapter 4: The First Miracle**

 _Doctor Naveen Nunna:_

Sam Winchester came in with a comminuted fracture and severe bruising to his chest and abdomen. His brother explained that they had stopped a group of men from invading a home at one of the farms in the Mesilla Valley.

Sam was actually admitted under the name, "Sam Moore." A paperwork screw up as far as we could tell. After the news stories, we learned his name was Sam Winchester and his chart was fixed.

With his type of injury, I wanted to call the police so that a report could be filed, but the pressing concern was that Sam was still unconscious. He clearly had some contusions, and we wanted to make sure that there wasn't any intracranial bleeding.

I sent for a CT scan while we prepped his arm for a splint.

 _Miranda Reyes:_

There wasn't any official police report, but there was a cop at the emergency room taking statements for a different case. It's a little unclear who told him about Dean and Sam, since everyone working the emergency room wants to claim that they told the police about Dean and Sam.

Anyway, the official police report says that three testimonies were taken, with minor differences, but what happened became clear pretty quickly.

Three men broke into the Castillo farm, because they thought no one was home. Unfortunately, Mrs. Castillo and her two daughters were in the house. The local priest was doing a home visit, and Sam and Dean were with him because they were giving him a ride to the house with the understanding that he'd let them sleep at the church. According to the priest, he was doing it as a favor to an old friend.

The boys heard noise when they drove up, and went inside, trying to scare the men off. They were both beaten in the process.

The police never found the men who attacked the Castillos, but when cops went back to the house to check, there were some graves in the back that had been unearthed and desecrated. Apparently, the suspects had returned to try to scare the Castillos. They wanted to leave a mark, the cops' profiler said.

That in itself never would have made the news. Definitely not the national news. I think the only reason it was ever published was because the first image anyone saw of Dean was this bruised guy on TV. He looked like he was a criminal, at first. Some redneck that got in a fight with the good old boys.

The fact that he was so beaten up was kind of ironic, actually.

 _Doctor Naveen Nunna:_

The X-rays showed us how bad the break was, and we were focusing on that, until the CT scans came back. The tech paged me, but I didn't have time to look at them until an hour later. There was a multi-victim hit and run; someone had driven up on a sidewalk and hit two mothers with strollers. The mothers were fine, but the children were both critical.

I gave my statement to the detective, and mentioned Dean and Sam's heroics. He talked with Mrs. Castillo and Father Damian. I don't know why they didn't call the police before that.

By the time I was able to take a look at Sam's CT scans, it was later in the day. There wasn't any intracranial bleeding, but we were able to see a mass on the scan.

I had to call oncology in for a consult.

 _Lauren Castillo:_

On the ride there, Dean told us what we were going to tell the doctors and the cops. Some guys broke into my house, I was screaming, Dean and Sam came in and got them out. Father Damian knew them.

I just kept saying that over and over, so that when the detective came and asked me about it, I told him that.

He wanted to know why I hadn't called the police and all I could think of was that little girl, flickering on and off like those old time movies.

I told him that we hadn't had time yet, everything had been so busy. I don't think he was too convinced, but it wasn't like Dean or Sam was going anywhere, Sam was out cold and the doctors didn't know why.

 _Doctor Naveen Nunna:_

Sam was still unconscious and I went over the results with Doctor Moss from oncology; he wanted an MRI. There was no reason that Sam should have still been unconscious, and we were concerned about the mass on his scans.

Dean refused to leave; I almost called security, but he heard Doctor Moss and me discussing the possibility of a glioma, and demanded to know if that meant that Sam had brain cancer.

Usually oncology has to give news like that to family members. I probably should have been more sensitive, but Dean was being... aggressive. I would have liked to wait for some more tests, but preliminary questions made glioma more likely.

Dean told us that yes, Sam had blackouts. Sometimes he saw bright lights. Sometimes he had vision problems.

I said that we were concerned about the mass on his scan, that, yes, we were concerned it might be glioma.

 _Ruby:_

I don't care what the fuck Dean thinks. Sam using his powers didn't give him brain cancer. His powers aren't physical, it's not like I stuck his head inside a nuclear reactor. I wasn't force-feeding him asbestos.

If using your brain gave you cancer, then Einstein would have been dead at twenty.

Think about how stupid that sounds anyway. Sam using his powers gave him brain cancer? Maybe eating crap and traveling constantly for 26 years lowered his immune system. Maybe that's why it got so big and no one noticed. Ever think of that?

 _Doctor Mark Moss:_

Naveen was tired, you could tell. Usually he has a great bedside manner, but he was pissed off talking to Sam's brother. I probably should have dealt with Dean, but when I tried to get his attention, he brushed me off. I remember he was focused on Naveen.

"Does Sam have cancer?" he kept asking. He had this tone of voice, kind of hard, a little bit like he was hurting. I deal with people like that every day. I think Naveen is used to dealing with broken bones and chest colds.

Naveen said that I was going to run more tests, that they'd work on getting a firmer diagnosis, and Dean pushed up into his face.

"Does Sam have _cancer_?" he asked.

I had halfway turned towards the nurses' station to get security and a counselor when Naveen just said, "We think so."

No bedside manner at all.

Dean turned around and walked back into Sam's room, and slammed his fist into the wall.

I called security.

 _Robert Singer:_

Dean called me from the hospital, wanted to know if I knew any healing spells. He didn't say anything about Sam, and when I asked, he just said he'd call back and hung up on me.

Now, I don't know about anyone else, but when a Winchester wants to start doing magic, dark magic, I get a distinct shiver. These boys know the downsides, and if they're at that point where downsides don't matter, shit has officially met the fan. When they get to asking about dark magic like that, you don't want to be standing between them and the information they want. It's a good way to end up on the wrong side of a gun.

I booked it to New Mexico, drove for about a day and a half straight.

 _Doctor Naveen Nunna:_

Security had to remove Dean, and we had a counselor talking with him. He was still very angry, but he was mad, not upset. I remember that, because I thought it was very odd. His brother had cancer and he was so angry.

I didn't see him for a few hours.

 _Father Damian:_

 _I see a lot of people in very dark times. I see them when they have nothing, when they feel like they have nothing, when they are lost and looking for answers._

 _But I have never seen a man as desolate as Dean. He felt there was no mercy for him, he said. He felt abandoned by the side he'd chosen to fight for._

 _Although I trust that God abandons no one, not even sinners... I'm not sure that Dean was wrong._

 _I called Bobby to ask him to come, and he said that he'd already talked to Dean. He asked me to make sure that Dean didn't get the chance to leave or to be on his own. I knew what he meant. Dean might not have cried or torn his clothing, but he was in mourning._

 _  
_Lauren Castillo:_   
_

I brought Dean and Father Damian some coffee from this diner around the corner. The girls had been getting a little wiggly in the waiting room, and they'd needed to eat. Father Damian was really good at comforting me when my husband died, and I knew that he was trying to do the same thing with Dean. I think some people just grieve different, and Dean was one of them. No one could have helped him.

Of course Betty wanted to hug Dean, but Nina was keeping her in her chair. I couldn't think of anything to say to him, I felt so guilty.

I don't know why. It wasn't my fault a damn ghost was on our property, but I felt bad anyway, because they'd been trying to protect my girls. If I'd lost my girls right after Michael, I think... I'd have died. It would have killed me.

And here were these two guys who rescued us, one of them dying because they'd saved my girls. When I first became a mom, I was so scared all the time, I didn't know if I was doing anything right. But, you pick things up, you learn that kids are kids no matter what.

I just reached out and held Dean, like I wished someone had hugged me after Mike. He struggled like Nina was starting to, trying to push me away. He could have pushed me off if he'd wanted to, that's why I held on so tight, and then he just leaned in.

I think he was crying, but I couldn't really tell. I know I was crying, because... Jesus. Isn't there enough shit in our lives without Mike dying and someone getting killed to save my girls?

 _Doctor Naveen Nunna:_

We let him back in to see his brother after a couple of hours. The case was Doctor Moss's now, but I checked in with him. It wasn't good news. They were sure that there was a mass, but they wanted to do exploratory surgery.

Dean came into the room as Doctor Moss and I were talking and walked straight to his brother's bed. He looked at Doctor Moss and me with such hatred.

Then he grabbed a fist in his brother's shirt and said something. I think it was, "Get better." He reached out to touch his brother's forehead and said it again.

His brother began convulsing, and both Doctor Moss and I reacted at the same time to try to get to the patient. Dean's back was blocking us, and when we tried to push him out of the way, he simply gripped Sam tighter.

I realized that there was someone outside the room who came in and began talking to Dean. It was the priest from the local Catholic church. He was trying to talk Dean away from the bed so that Doctor Moss and I could help Sam, but Dean wouldn't move, he just kept saying the same thing over and over again, "Get better, get _better, get better_."

When Sam stopped moving, I was afraid that he was dead.

 _Docor Mark Moss:_

Naveen was checking on Sam - he felt pretty guilty about having the brother carted off by security, I remember telling the nurse that. He wasn't usually as involved once he'd made sure that someone was admitted to the right floor.

Sam was a serious case, it wasn't a good sign that he hadn't woken up yet, and the mass was so large I don't know how it took so long for someone to notice. Naveen wanted to do more tests, but I knew what it was. And the kid didn't have a chance.

Dean came in, pushed right past both of us. He looked at us and - I know that he was upset - but he looked at us with pity, too. Then he put one hand on his brother's forehead and the other right over his chest.

For a second he paused, and then he said, "Heal."

Just that. "Heal."

He said it again, and Sam groaned, tried to say something, and opened his eyes.

 _Father Damian:_

Dean and I spoke in the parking lot briefly, but just as I asked him what Sam's funeral arrangements were, Dean stood up and walked back into the hospital, back to his brother's room.

He didn't say anything, didn't look at me, just went into the room. I was at the door, because I thought maybe he was going to let his brother go. But, instead, he reached down and did something with his hands and began shouting at Sam.

It was horrible to watch, Sam looked like he was choking. The doctors were trying to get to Sam so they could help him, but Dean held on to Sam, and kept yelling at him.

"No," he was yelling. "No, you can't leave. I'm not letting you go. You're going to get better."

There was a light coming out of him, it was so overwhelming, I had to look away. I missed the miracle, being afraid of that light. To this day, I wish I had had the strength to stay true and watch, even if it meant going blind.

Sam stopped moving and opened his eyes, he said his brother's name. I remember that. He said his brother's name and they both were holding each other, tight.

That's when the screaming began.

 _Miranda Reyes:_

Half the hospital claims to have been in the room when Dean touched Sam.

Here's what we know.

Doctor Nunna and Doctor Moss were working jointly on Sam's case. Jane Neal, RN, had just taken blood from Sam, and was walking back to the nurses' station when she heard screaming from the room. She ran back, saw that there was danger to both doctors and the patient, and ran to the desk to call security.

She claims that Dean, Father Damian, and Doctor Nunna and Doctor Moss were in there with Sam.

But, none of them remember seeing her, so we can't be sure who's telling the truth.

Dean went into his brother's room, and Sam had a tumor the size of a golf ball. When Dean walked out, there wasn't a cancer cell in Sam's body.

 _Doctor Naveen Nunna:_

I was immediately paged downstairs, but I was reluctant to leave Sam without knowing that he was stable, so I pushed past Dean and checked Sam's vitals. All within normal range.

He was lucid and kept asking Dean what he had done.

Over the loudspeakers they began paging all doctors back to their floors. It was chaos. I had to take the stairs back down to Emergency because every elevator was busy. He'd...

There was...

Every person in the hospital was healed. No matter how minor, no matter what was wrong. Everyone was healed.

 _Doctor Mark Moss:_

It took almost three hours to get Sam in to get a CT, because everyone was trying to have their patients tested.

I had a woman on chemo, and when she'd walked in, she could barely keep down lunch, but when I checked in on her, she was walking around, laughing. She was healthy. The sores inside her mouth were gone.

She looked cheerful.

And it wasn't just her. Everywhere. This whole floor. Everyone was cured. I don't know what happened, but I could tell - I just _knew_ that Dean Winchester had been the one to do it.

 _  
_Jim Novak:_   
_

Castiel felt it, right away. They all did. All of the angels. I think even I felt it, and I was just the human host.

Angels aren't... nice. They aren't like the ones on TV, the "Touched by an Angel" ones. They're cold and they're warriors. But when they felt what Dean did? It was like they finally heard God the way they'd all been waiting to. It sounded like glory.

Castiel didn't tell Dean how to heal people. I'm pretty sure he didn't. I don't even think that he knew _how_ Dean did what he did.

But, even if he didn't know the how, he knew the what. It meant that Dean was a prophet – Old Testament level prophet. Think Moses, or David, or Joseph. Dean had a direct connection to God in a way that even the angels didn't.

 _Lauren Castillo:_

The first I knew of it was this. Betty was playing on my lap when Nina came and stood right next to me and said, "I feel all better, Mommy."

I thought she was just trying to get my attention.

 _Reverend Doctor Scott Harrell:_

We don't get to choose what the Lord tells, we don't get to say, "Hey, God, not today. I'm busy right now."

So when God shows us something, shows us something like a whole hospital being cured by one man? When he shows us something like what happened in Las Cruces, it's our job to listen.

We pray and pray and when God speaks, it's our job to hear Him. It's our job to sit up and take notice. We might pray for God's help choosing the right path to take, we might pray that He show us whether to walk through that door. In the end, when God doesn't want you to walk through that door, He closes it.

It's our job to pay attention, and I prayed and prayed and prayed, asking what to do in this world with everything going wrong, with everyone losing faith and losing their jobs. With all of the loss of life and hope, I prayed for God's guidance.

And when I looked up from praying, God had thrown open the door for me and said, "Go see my glory in the world. Go see what I've given you, go see Dean Winchester."

 _Miranda Reyes:_

I was stuck in a meeting about upcoming stories and we had one of the Midwest producers on the phone. We were talking about maybe doing another story on the dwindling middle class, when he said, "Well, aren't you going to do anything about Las Cruces?"

Everyone was a little confused, and then he said, "You know, New Mexico?"

Apparently, he'd called it in to his boss, but the message had never made it further than that because his boss thought it was crazy. I did, too. Everyone at the table thought it was insane. A hospital filled with sick people, and all of them entirely healed. We were about to pass it up as National Enquirer stuff when Bob, the producer, said that Fox already had their cameras set up.

They said they were sending me out there, I had to be on a plane in an hour and they wanted a briefing written for me to go on air with as soon as I got to the hospital.

I hated stories like that, where I didn't even get to do my own reporting. But when your boss says "jump" you grab a trampoline. I wanted to go back to Iraq, and if it took me doing a BS story on a miracle, I was ready to do anything.

It didn't turn out to be BS, and it wasn't fake. It was the biggest story in the past decade, maybe the past millennium. I look back at that meeting about how we were all thinking in terms of the economic depression, of the new president and how his policies would affect jobs.

I'm looking at that and I kind of have to laugh.

How could we have been so ignorant?

 **Chapter 5: In the Aftermath**

 _Father Damian:_

Of course it was a miracle. Men and women who were at the last hour of their lives were given a second chance. They were healed, they were given new life. I called the Bishop, immediately. I had seen a miracle, what else could I do?

God worked to perform a miracle, and I saw Dean for his true nature. He was a saint, I realized it as soon as he laid his hands on Sam. I don't understand what the argument was, why it became such an issue.

It was a Catholic miracle.

 **Miranda Reyes:**

I can't even watch the first story. It's an embarrassment. I got there with Max, my producer, with barely enough time to fix my hair before I was on air.

"What are we looking at, Miranda?" "Well, I don't know, John, since you threw me on a plane and I haven't had a chance to actually talk to anyone yet."

Of course, I didn't say that. I hit all the bullet points, and you can see the hospital in the background because we got no direct access to them or the doctors. You could see people screaming and crying. My camera guy got a picture of the emergency doors, people were on their knees praying. I was baptized when I was a kid, but I haven't been to church in years and I remember rolling my eyes. I thought it was a hoax, or mass hysteria. Everyone thought they were cured, so they were.

I got a hold of this one guy who ran out of the hospital and he was talking about how he'd broken his arm falling off his roof that morning. Then he shows me his arm: it looked normal. I was smiling and nodding, and I thought that he'd probably just sprained it and was lying to make it seem more important.

But the whole back of his shirt was covered in blood: I had him turn around for the camera. He hadn't just broken his arm. He'd broken his arm and fallen on a rake. His spine had been punctured.

It wasn't just him. There were hundreds and hundreds of people, enough for weeks of interviews.

In the end, I just kept interviewing, and interviewing. No one knew anything. No one knew what had happened, and a lot of people thought that it was some miracle drug in the hospital's air supply. Some hippie thought that it was a mystic dance she'd learned at a weekend medicine man camp.

There were rumors that the government had erased all their memories so they only thought they'd been magically healed.

Someone thought it was aliens.

We reported it all. Four hours of complete nonsense. I'd take really brief breaks, get a drink of water, look at whatever background we could dig up on the people who'd been healed. I remember reporting that ten of them went to the same high school.

Now I want to... I don't know. Shake myself. Shake my producer. They all came from Las Cruces! Of _course_ they went to the same high school.

Father Damian was the one who put us on to Dean. He came out, did a little sermon about miracles and God's love, and then said that he'd seen a miracle performed. By Dean. I reported them as Sam and Dean Moore, because some idiot got the name wrong. Their social security numbers checked out to these two twin brothers that died in 1997, but that part wouldn't come out until a lot later.

 _Ruby:_

Of course I felt it. That's like asking someone at the epicenter of an earthquake if they felt their house shake. The whole _Earth_ was the center of this one, and for demons it was like feeling a 10.5 when you're on the top of a building. I was in Dallas talking with a few other demons I knew - ones that had been on Earth for about as long as I had been. Just catching up on news, keeping in touch with what was going on down below.

There was some gossip about Sirathel, who helped run intake, something about closing the gates of Hell, and some news that apparently Lilith got the support of a couple dukes. She was making a name for herself in a way that was pretty intense. I mean, if she didn't want me dead, I might have reconsidered my alliances.

Sam and Dean were doing their kamikaze thing, so wrapped up in each other that I'd tell Sam something and he'd immediately tell Dean, who'd tell the angels. I might as well have just put Castiel on my speed dial.

Then, like I said, 10.5. Let me give you some perspective. When the Hell's Gate opened up, it was maybe a 4. This flattened all three of us; we hit the ground and screamed for mercy.

Of course we knew what it was, a miracle. Not just a statue-cries-some-red-corn-syrup miracle, not some made for Lifetime TV miracle. This was big. The demons looked at me and I knew I'd lost them. I almost lost myself then.

When someone's throwing around miracles that big, you want to be working for the side that takes them down. The demons knew that Lilith had the guns on her side to bring Hell on Earth, but Heaven on Earth is its own kind of hell.

Do you get it yet?

We lost the middle road when Dean pulled that miracle. At the time, we didn't know it was Dean, but we knew it was a miracle. Now it wasn't just Lilith against the status quo, it was Lilith against God. God comma The. _That_ God.

 _He wasn't big on forgiving, and so the options were pretty narrow. Lilith or death by holy fire. Everyone pretty much chose Lilith._

 _  
_Robert Singer:_   
_

I heard on the radio that something had gone down in Las Cruces, I knew it was the boys and I knew that it was dark. Pamela Barnes, this psychic I knew, called me to let me know she was going to ground and that if I wanted to contact her, the only way would be to leave her a message at an answering service. I told her to wait, to think about it, but she'd already hung up.

By the time I got to the border of town, you couldn't get near the hospital. There were too many people in the way, all these religious nutjobs who'd come to see the miracle.

Don't know what they thought they'd see. It looked like a lot of 'em wanted to be healed or thought that it was like going to see Old Faithful. Maybe they thought he _was_ like Old Faithful and he'd heal a whole new hospital of people at the same time tomorrow. After figuring out that they weren't letting you near the hospital anymore unless you were coming in by ambulance, I went to see Father Damian.

That bastard, excuse my french... Reverend Harrell was on the radio already, giving his perspective on the whole mess and I thought that he was an ass then and I think he's a worse one now. Not that Father Damian was much better. I got to the church and Damian's got a full house, up on stage praying his ass off and talking about God's touch.

I listened for a couple of minutes before I couldn't take it and headed in to see Sam and Dean.

Those boys've surprised me more than a couple of times. Once was when I saw Sam alive after watching him be dead for a while. Another time was when Dean knocked on my door after I'd helped bury him. Seeing 'em sitting at the table eating dinner like they hadn't had food since the last full moon, that wasn't a real surprise.

For a while I just watched the two of them and then I asked 'em what the hell they'd done because whatever it was had just made a mountain of shit for us all to deal with.

Still- I mean, I'm still pissed off about it, but I was pretty glad that Sam was okay, that he'd survived.

 _Reverend Doctor Scott Harrell:_

 _I knew it was a miracle that Dean Winchester performed, I knew in my bones when I heard about it on the news. And everyone else did too._

 _Dean Winchester was a gift to us on Earth and his touch healed the sick, gave hope to the hopeless. We were lost and found at the same time. He found us wandering in a wilderness of secular beliefs and brought us back to the truth: there is God, and he does love us. Only by letting Jesus Christ into your heart can you be truly saved._

 _I say he lost us, though, because it's also true. What we knew and understood about the world, about ourselves, was lost. He showed us that the truth of our lives wasn't just the great commission, it was to fight not just in the mind, but in the body, too._

 _  
_Father Damian:_   
_

_Men cannot heal._

 _To say that is a heresy. It's _heretical_ to believe that a single man can do miracles. God can do miracles, God saved the whole hospital, God blessed us all - believers and not - because he loves us all._

Dean was a saint, his hands performed the miracle. But what Reverend Harrell means is that Dean himself healed them, that God gave him that power. No, no.

God answers prayers, of course He does, but does He do it in a way we understand?

This is a way we could all understand; God touched us. If we say that Dean did that, we take away what God did, we put up Dean as our false idol. I've spoken with him, and he might be a saint, but he is not Christ reborn. He is not God.

 _Feliz Wills:_

During the miracle? I was at work, in the middle of doing the accounts for our office, signing off on timecards, making sure that people could be paid for one more month. I remember exactly where I was on September 11, and I remember exactly where I was during the Las Cruces Miracle. My mom called me, she'd just figured out speed dial on her cell phone, and kept accidentally calling me when she was trying to dial the phone.

Anyway, my mom called and told me that a miracle had happened at her hospital. She said that she could walk again and that her arthritis was gone. I mean, I still have all of her old medical information at home somewhere, in case it comes back.

Honestly? I didn't believe her. I didn't believe her at all. She's a little...

 _[FW gestures]_

About things like miracles, you know? I had to take her out to this desert before she'd go to the hospital so that she could take a photo of the sun, because she thought she was seeing the Virgin Mary.

Mom called me, said I needed to come down immediately and if I didn't get there in time, she was going straight to church, I could pick her up there. Mom's like that. When I was little, my brother's teachers kept wanting to get him put in special ed, and she just bulldozed them over. Get with her or get out of her way.

I called the hospital, and all the lines were busy. Mom was on a lot of pain meds, and I thought she must've been given a bad dose, the doctors needed to get on that. Because it sounded kind of crazy at first. A miracle at the hospital. So, I kept calling, and doing the accounts, and after ten minutes I just picked up my stuff and locked up the books. I kind of waved at the secretary on my way out and she went, "Going to see the miracle?"

Which was when I realized that Mom wasn't on bad meds. So, on the ride to the hospital, I kept listening to that AM news network, you know the one? With those two annoying announcers.

They were reporting it and interviewing people, and as soon as I heard the numbers, I knew that I'd have to go to the church, there wasn't any way I was getting through a crowd of ten thousand people when Mom was probably on her knees praying already.

Father Damian was speaking when I came in, and he was really into it. The guys on the news kept saying that no one knew what was going on, that it was a freak scientific phenomenon, but Father Damian knew right away. He said that a man named Dean Winchester had seen a miracle, that he'd seen the light of God healing his brother. Apparently, everyone else in the hospital, too.

I couldn't get Mom to come home for hours; she just kept listening, even after Father Damian stopped talking.

 _Bethany Headley:_

The first thing I remember was hearing Reverend Harrell on the radio telling me that a man had healed a whole hospital full of people and it was a sign that God was still speaking. I belonged to his church in Phoenix, and he was on his local radio program from Las Cruces. It was so moving, listening to him.

I felt the will of God and it was so good. Reverend Harrell said that Dean Winchester was in Las Cruces and that it was our duty as good Christians to come and hear the Word with him. I prayed for a while with my husband, and then we knew what we had to do. The roads were really crowded, and it took us about seven or eight hours to get there.

When we got there, we went straight to the hospital, but Reverend Harrell was speaking and he said that Dean was being held in the Catholic church and it was our job to free him from their disbelief, it was our job to listen to him, since the Catholics had closed their heart to his message.

Of course we had to listen to him! He had the ability to heal!

 _[Interviewer: Were you there when... he came out of the church?]_

Yes, yes, I was there. There was a lot of us, several thousand, I think. And Reverend Harrell was right: why was someone else trying to take the attention away from Dean? That priest was preaching when he should have been listening. We all should have been listening.

I remember grabbing hold of the doors. It was me and a lot of other women, and we just pulled, kept pulling. They had no right to lock him up like he was a... like he wasn't the story.

 _Miranda Reyes:_

Yeah. The church. I need a cigarette. You mind?

 _[brief pause, MR lights cigarette]_

So, we were getting all the facts: the rough estimate was that about 248 beds at the hospital, plus all the people in emergency, and all the people who were there but didn't know they were sick - you know, staff, friends and family. Now you can easily find about a thousand people who say they were healed at Las Cruces. If I was guessing, though? Maybe 325 people.

Still.

I mean, that's a lot of people. We got footage of Dean. This beat-up guy getting rushed to a car. Sam's in the shot, too, but he looks tall and you can't really tell anything. He was trying to block the camera with his body. We ran that footage every way we could, and then when he got out of his car and was rushed into the church, that was another minute and a half of footage that we could analyze: did his posture say if he was in any pain? Did he look holy? Was that a gold cross around his neck?

 _[pause]_

 _[Interviewer: How did Dean get out of the church?]_

Kicking and screaming.

No, not really. But...

Reverend Harrell was there, and we'd had him on air a few times talking about the implications of a man who could heal. And you watch the footage, you listen to his sermons and he never actually says...

He never actually says, "Tear down the walls of this church, throw yourself into the windows, break the pews." He _doesn't_. He's not quite full of it when he claims that wasn't him or his people.

Still, Harrell's standing outside and this mass of people surge at the church, and in about five minutes the doors are gone, in ten people are carrying the pews out of the church.

It's insane. I really don't like to think about it, because here I am, a journalist and I'm watching people destroy a church in the name of God. Well, in the name of Dean Winchester. You can't make it out in the video, it just sounds like chanting, but I was there.

They were chanting _Dean_. It was worse than a football game, it was this roar, like a mob. There was some fighting with the people inside the church, screams. All of us with our cameras, were back at a distance, because it was insane.

Then they just stopped, backed up. Someone was trampled by it.

The footage can't really show how it went. Dean and Sam and this unnamed guy who we never saw again, all had shotguns and they backed the crowd out of the church. It was more than scary; it was just really quiet. And all the Catholic parishioners were behind them. They kept reaching out to touch Dean and he's flinching. He was literally flinching at every touch.

Scott Harrell started to say something, he was on a microphone, and... are you sure you can't just use the video?

 _[Interviewer: It's an oral history, so...]_

Right. Harrell starts to say something at Dean, but Dean just kneels down next to the girl that got trampled, she looked like she was really injured. There's no way to tell now, but someone suggested that she'd probably had a broken leg, and probably injured ribs.

Dean touches her, and she starts convulsing. It looked like an epileptic fit. Then she stopped and Dean helped her up, I think. That was the 325 at the hospital, plus one.

 _Robert Singer:_

The boys and I were trying to figure out what our next move would be because I'd gotten a call from Ellen asking whether I knew what had happened. Apparently, some hunters she knew that worked with spirits were all up in arms because the whole astral plane or Z space or what have you was a mess. There was a lot of accusations going around.

The boys and I decided, it'd be smart to leave town before some demon got it in their head to come after Dean. We were about to skip out when this mob started taking apart the church.

Dean was out the door before me or Sam could say anything. We just grabbed guns and followed him out. He was lookin' a little too wild to talk sense into. We were probably lucky he didn't fire off a warning shot, the way he looked. That would have set them off like a herd of cattle.

I don't remember what he said exactly, but it stopped the mob cold. Knowing who he was talking to, he probably said that God didn't want them doing that, but that doesn't sound like him. We walked them out of the church, and someone got trampled. Dean bent down, and touched her.

I knew that Sam wasn't happy about it, he was practically ready to have it out with Dean right there in front of all those people. When she was walking, Dean just followed her outside and said that he'd talk with them in an hour, but they'd have to behave themselves.

By the time we got back to the kitchen, the boys were already sniping at each other like a couple of pups. I'd been around 'em a lot, but this was a new fight. Maybe not _new_. It sounded like they'd had it a few times before, the way they talked to each other, it was familiar.

Sam said that his powers could help them, and Dean called bullshit, and they went back and forth for a while, and then Sam said that they didn't know anything about Dean's powers either.

What it came down to, and I agreed with Sam on this one, was that we didn’t nearly know the cost of Dean's powers. It was a pretty big ticket item to be buying without a receipt and a return policy. Eventually, they dragged Ruby being a demon into it, and Castiel's agenda, too.

They went on for a while, and I left to go talk to Father Damian, who was trying to get his people out of the church safely. I wanted to help, but he was dead set against being around Dean much longer.

Called him a false idol, I think. You'd have to ask him. Because he didn't want Dean right then, but later when it all came to a head, I think he wanted him back. Can't remember. By then, things had gotten so bad that we were trying to kill Dean.

 **Chapter 6: The Sermon on the Mount**

 _Ruby_ :

Sam called me a few hours after the first miracle. I was on my own, trying to catch my breath from feeling... all that power. Right after, I couldn't even walk, I could barely move my legs. I wasn't in any shape to be driving, I'd have killed this corpse twice.

The sky was a mess of demons. I don't think anyone looked up to see it? But it was like the highway during rush hour: every demon in the world trying to figure out whether to stick it out in a host or go back to Hell.

It was easier for me to stash the body and jump into one closer to Sam. I ended up with this Catholic woman, kind of loud if you ask me, but no host's perfect. At least it was entertainment.

Dean and Sam were in the middle of their version of "Who drank all the milk?" so I hung back, let them go at it. The only thing new in that whole argument was Dean's powers. Sam was finally starting to ask why he was crippled by Dean's morals, when Dean was allowed to go around shattering reality with his miracles.

Oh, and I think that's when Dean realized the benefits of having the masses on his side.

They were talking about Harrell's church, and what it could be used for. I'd never tell Sam this, but Dean was right about one thing. The sheer numbers meant that they could put two people on every seal left and still have enough for a shift change every hour.

 _Robert Singer_ :

The trouble was that we were all so rushed that we couldn't even think straight about what we were agreeing to. It was a shotgun wedding, with a helluva lot of buckshot in the gun pointing Dean towards the altar.

Dean thought that having all those people out there able to fight off demons could help us. Hell, at least it'd mean that all of 'em would have salt lines on their windows and doors. The problem is that no one out there was ready. It wasn't like it is now, it was worse. Me and Sam were telling Dean he needed to be careful, that it wasn't the right time to tell everyone about Heaven and Hell and Lilith trying to bring back Lucifer.

But, Dean was tired, like I said. Both he and Sam were. They were damned near exhausted being the only ones fighting this war. Dean wanted more people on his side, I think. He was just so tired of being alone.

I think that now. I've had a lot of time to think since then, a lot of time to think about what we could've done different.

At the time, I thought they were both idjits. Dean for thinking it'd be a good idea, and Sam for not just knockin' him over the head and dragging him back to my place.

But I do regret what it came to. I love those boys like my own flesh and blood, and when it came to what it did... Like I said, I've had a lot of time to think, and to wish that it could have gone down any other way. That there'd been any other option, when it came to going after Dean. You've got no idea how much I wish that.

 _Feliz Wills_ :

Father Damian had forced my mom out the door, got her a ride to my brother's house. I was just helping him lock everything up, make sure that everyone was out. It was part of being my mom's daughter. If she'd been a decade younger, she'd have been doing the same thing.

All of a sudden... it's hard to explain. It was like I was driving my car, and all of a sudden, someone else was driving it. Someone else was shifting gears and getting me off at an exit I didn't want to get off at. Only, it wasn't my car. It was my body.

I just watched myself walk back into the kitchen, and listen right at the doorway. I tried screaming. I tried shouting for help, but there was nothing. My body didn't do anything.

I said... something. I think it was, "Shut up, this'll be over before you can say a Hail Mary."

Then, Dean was walking out to give his sermon, and my body reached out to grab Sam's arm. He looked at me, and I don't know what he saw. He saw what was inside of me, what was controlling me.

That was when I knew.

You know, when you're little, the Devil's like this ghost story. You're really scared of him and you're scared of Hell, but you don't really think... you don't think it's real. Looking at Sam? Knowing that he was seeing something inside of me that wasn't me? I remember being horrified because I knew that was Hell, I knew Hell was real and I'd just touched a part of it.

My body and him had a conversation. I didn't understand it, but he seemed to. It was a conversation about demons and evil and if I could have, I think I might have cried. It was evil. Sam was evil. That's what I knew.

I smelled smoke, but not like a fire, a nasty sort of smoke, like rotten eggs. Sam was holding me up, and I screamed and pushed him off and ran back to my car. I don't think that anyone heard me over the sermon.

It... I don't want to sound too clichéd, but I took a couple of showers after that, and got really drunk because it wasn't a good feeling, someone using you. It took me a while before I could go back to church. And I think... I couldn't listen to Dean after that. I felt sick every time I thought about it.

 _Ruby_ :

Sam said that he didn't care about the demons that weren't going to join him because of his brother. It was so...

It was so fucking _narrow-minded_ of him. One day he says he doesn't want to be an old man doing this, the next he wants to buddy up with Heaven's golden boy. But, you don't get it both ways. Because Dean had these ideas, he had this really single-minded thought that demons were evil: all of us. You couldn't trust us, you couldn't work with us, you couldn't realize that maybe life was a lot more complicated than that.

We'd met up once before New Mexico on this angel job. A fucking mess that was. I ended up getting tortured, this body I was in got shredded and in the end do I get a fucking 'thank you'? A 'hey, sorry about the torture, can I buy you breakfast?'

Whatever.

 _Reverend Doctor Scott Harrell_ :

It was a beautiful sermon. It was like listening and knowing for the first time that there was a right way and we could follow it.

At first, I know that my heart was skeptical, but I knew that I had to work and open it to this truth. I had to trust in God and God's divine will. Dean spoke of a war, a war that I'd seen in the hearts and minds of every young person today. A war for souls.

He spoke of evil and good, and I knew that it was our job to help him, yes it was.

His message was beautiful, he just needed a little help with the words. I looked to God and knew it was my duty to make sure that Dean had that language to tell the world about this war.

 _Ruby_ :

 _I told him where to find me and I left because I wasn't getting anywhere with Sam and I could hear part of the sermon in the next room. It was creepy._

 _Like, Dean would say something pretty straight-forward: demons are trying to take over the world. And this other guy – Reverend Harrell, but I had no idea who the fuck he was then – anyway, he goes on about how that means that liberals and atheists are ruining America._

 _Sam and I both, we kept getting distracted by it. Finally, I just left._

 _Luckily, I booked before the angels showed up or my ass would have been dry rub on Castiel's barbeque._

 _ _Robert Singer_ : _

They call 'em the Prophesies of the Mount now. Don't know why. The church sure as hell wasn't on a mount, Dean sure as hell ain't a prophet, and the only ones who were talking sense that day were the angels. Point of fact, the only real prophecy came from those wing-heads.

Two of 'em showed up like cattle to the call, Castiel and Uriel. They waited until the end of the sermon and then sidled up to Dean, cornering him in the kitchen before he and Sam could get back into arguin'. They went on about how Dean was ready to step up and lead.

 _[Interviewer: What did they prophesize?]_

You want specifics, you'd have to ask the pair of 'em. But, the important thing was that Dean would lead the humans in a war on Hell. Which, just... Shit. That's a whole fuckload of shit.

Then, Harrell had to go get involved, filming the whole thing and raising his hands, Praise Lord and Jesus, thank god I happened to have a film crew on hand so that I could insert myself in a war I don't understand.

He butted in, demanded to see proof of angelship, or some such bullshit. Castiel just looked at him, and Harrell backed down. Must have seen something in those eyes. Then Harrell was praising and praying on camera for the success of Dean's mission, for his safety and such. I thought it was about as real as a stacked deck of cards, but the angels seemed impressed by it.

You'd think they'd get over prayer, since they've been hearing it for thousands of years.

 _Jim Novak_ :

 _[Interviewer: Do you remember the sermon on the mount?]_

Yes. I think that it was reassuring to Castiel that Dean stepped up to his place willingly. Dean had been... difficult about some of the early decisions he'd been asked to make.

Castiel and Uriel both appeared to Dean so that they could pledge their allegiance to him. They expected Dean to lead the human armies in a war against Lucifer, I think. Because after so many battles, Castiel knew he couldn't. He didn't have the ability to lead a human army.

But Dean and Sam could read between the lines. There could only be a human army if it meant that Lucifer was free, and had his own army. They weren't... happy that the angels believed it was inevitable that Lucifer would get free.

 _[Interviewer: Did you make any prophecies?]_

I didn't. Castiel didn't, either. He just talked to Dean about his expectations, about leading the human armies, about Dean fighting off Lucifer. The angels thought that they'd won their most recent battle because of him. They finally thought that they could win, now that he was working on their side.

 

 _Joanna Beth Harvelle_ :

I listened to the sermon; it was hard not to. It was on every TV in the bar, and they kept replaying it after he finished. Dean was trying to explain about the war, and people just didn't want to listen to him. He wanted them to... to _do_ something, but they just wanted him to heal, to prove he was worth the fuss they were already making.

When I saw the other thing, the part with Castiel and Uriel, I had to sit down. I'd stitched Dean up once and I knew he wasn't a bulletproof saint, and he definitely wasn't the leader they wanted him to be. Reverend Harrell tried to make it a quick turn around, his whole "Let's pray for Dean" – it was just an excuse so he didn't have to do anything _but_ pray.

A lot of really good people were caught up in it. I remember there was a week or so where I couldn't even drive through town without seeing a church sign about praying for humanity, praying for Dean.

Of course, I didn't think much about it. My mom showed up a few days later and we holed up, stockpiling everything we'd need in case I was wrong and Dean was the leader in the biggest war since the very first one.

 _Miranda Reyes_ :

They were setting up camps around town. I mean that. Camps. There weren't enough hotel rooms for them, so first it started with all of the parking lots, then the city parks around the church, then they were renting out farm land. Apparently someone tried to buy up that farm that Dean and Sam and gotten hurt at, and the owner refused to sell, kicked everyone off her property.

President Obama made a speech about it. Really amazing speech. "The world is larger than we can conceive, and the scope of human ability is greater than we can possibly imagine. How can we put limits on ourselves, when we have proof that our creator gives us none?"

It got crazier over the next few days. At first you didn't see Dean go anywhere without Sam. We all commented on that, how much they must have loved each other. But, Dean couldn't even leave without someone begging to be healed. So... he started doing it. It was insane, really. He'd try to walk to his car, and he'd end up taking a half hour to get from the church to his parking spot because he'd have to cure someone of cystic fibrosis and someone else of a broken arm.

Eventually, Dean started going out without Sam, or he'd get left behind, we couldn't really tell. They were pretty good about not talking where we could film them. After the priest left, they were the only ones in the church and they boarded up all the windows and doors. No one got in or out unless Dean or Sam let them in.

I was researching my first big story about this. Everyone else was doing Dean and Sam's daily comings and goings, but I was the only one with my hands on their FBI file. I have to admit, I was excited. Here he was, the guy everyone was touting as this religious messiah, and he was connected to murders in Saint Louis, robberies in Arkansas.

CNBC had done some commentary about how no one could find records of Dean or Sam Moore, and a few law enforcement agencies had come forward and said that it _looked_ like a couple of guys that they'd held on suspicion of credit card fraud.

But everyone seemed to think that the fact that there weren't any records just meant... immaculate conception or spontaneous creation.

My story blew all that out of the water.

 _Lauren Castillo_ :

I tried to ignore all of it, because... Because knowing that little girl, that little innocent girl had become a monster? That scared the living crap out of me. I wanted to pretend it hadn't happened, but I couldn't. If it had just been Dean... If it had just been Dean that was real, that meant that just God was real, but this? This meant that the Devil and demons and the snake in the fucking garden...

All of them were real. And that was scary.

I just wanted my kids to have a normal life. I think... well, this is very selfish of me, but I wanted to ignore what Dean was saying, I didn't want my kids to believe in any of that. The Heaven, the Hell. None of it.

Now I could find more than enough farm hands, but it didn't take too long for me to figure out that they all wanted to be where Dean had been before he'd saved the hospital. I hired four men to work the field and they did the work for a couple of weeks, they knew what they were doing, but they...

They were creepy. They kept staring at the house, they'd come out to the graves and pray. One of them, this big guy named Manuel, knocked on my door and asked if he could see where Dean had fought with the attackers. He was polite and I didn't feel _scared_. Not really. I just felt...

 _[Interviewer: Awkward?]_

No. More uncomfortable, because it was a lie. There weren't any attackers, and it had been the both of them: both Dean and Sam. The way Harrell kept talking about it on the radio, Dean had fought off a whole gang on his own.

And it wasn't a gang, it had just been this little girl. This little dead girl.

So, I told him, no, he couldn't come in. He left, no problem, and didn't ask again, but I still felt so... nauseated. All the time. Especially in town.

They don't call it like it was, when they talk about Las Cruces. It was a pretty average sized town before the hospital. Maybe 74,000 people. By the end of the first week – and I mean it, a week. Maybe five, six days after the hospital, there were already 20,000 new people in town. Times were hard.

I'm sorry, that sounds like something off the wall, but people were losing their jobs and then all of a sudden, from New Mexico, someone's saying that he's on a mission from God. Why wouldn't you pack up and drive to New Mexico to see what it was about? I guess that's what they were thinking. Because they just kept coming and coming and coming.

The whole town began to feel different, all the camps, everything smelled a little like urine. There weren't enough bathrooms, even with all the porta-potties that the town had set up. And everyone was friendly, but aggressively so. Like, that fake-friendly, you know?

Las Cruces almost doubled in size in months and the town couldn't support all of them, they were sleeping in parks and in parking lots and they started renting out farms to sleep in. A few of my neighbors were renting at a pretty expensive rate. It was better than having them stay there anyway, without payment.

A couple of weeks after the hospital, this man in a suit showed up saying that he represented the Glory Church of Christ from Phoenix and that he'd like to talk about buying my farm. I was pissed off and told him to stuff it, because I wasn't selling Michael's farm.

I found out later, it was Scott Harrell's church that had wanted to buy. Maybe I should have just sold it and taken the kids with me. That would have been easier in a lot of ways.

 _Bethany Headley:_

The daily worship started after a couple of weeks. By then, a lot of the church had already moved. We'd set up camp, like a big revival, near Burn Lake at the edge of town. It wasn't a huge lake, just something near the interstate, and close enough to the meetings so we didn't have to do much travel.

At first there weren't any meetings, we'd just listen to Reverend Harrell when he preached at night, and then we'd wait for Dean at the church. He always went out with his brother. I don't mind saying this now, with what we know, but I never liked his brother. It was like watching the snake talk to Eve and not being able to stop it.

Sam even used to pretend to worry about his brother, he'd help hold him up after Dean had healed someone. He'd pretend he was protecting his brother by not letting anyone else touch him after Dean had healed someone.

Reverend Harrell finally realized the best way to help Dean was to make sure he could spread the word, and heal those who needed it at the same time. So he helped Dean set up the daily meetings.

More of the congregation kept coming, and more faithful from other congregations began attending. It was so beautiful.

 _Reverend Doctor Scott Harrell_ :

It was an act of mercy to set up the daily meetings. Dean couldn't even go out with out being assaulted by everyone who needed his help. And he was more than happy to do it, I know, but I helped him understand the benefits of doing it at a certain time, at a certain place.

It would mean he could go out for gas without a police escort.

In the end, it was easier for me to use all the people who helped me set up my church. They were all willing, and they all knew what to do, who had to be talked to. Simply, there wasn't enough space in all of Las Cruces to hold the parishioners who wanted to attend the daily worship, so we arranged to rent out some farmland and set up there.

Of course the media talked, comparing it to a sideshow. They called us holy rollers, they said we were wrong. But what did they know?

That first meeting, twenty thousand people showed up. Two hundred wanted to be healed, and Dean touched them, but I realized we'd have to find a better way to arrange who could be healed.

Because, well...

Dean was on stage and he spoke again about his mission and our mission and I had to help him tell the congregation what God wanted them to do. If we'd been looking at God's windows our whole lives waiting for him to say we should go through them, Dean had just thrown open the front door and said that we should walk through.

People needed help understanding, and it was my job to make sure that they heard the Word and that they understood. So, he spoke, and then I spoke, and then he looked down and reached for the first person who needed him. It was a little girl, no older than my daughter, and the next was an old man, and the next was a mother and the next a young soldier, and on and on.

Two hundred people, and by the last I was holding him up and we were all praising Jesus. It was wonderful.

 _[Interviewer: Do you remember if Sam was there?]_

Yes. Sam was there, off stage when we started. I still can't believe that we didn't see through him, that _Dean_ didn't see through him, but maybe he did. Maybe he knew and let him exist like that anyway. Maybe it was part of God's plan.

But, Sam was there, and when I helped Dean off stage and had someone help him back to the church, Sam was gone.

 _Ruby_ :

Sam showed up at my motel.

 _[Interviewer: Do you know why?]_

Just a stab in the dark, but I think he and Dean probably had a fight.

 _[Interviewer: About what?]_

I don't know. Sam didn't talk about it.

 _[Interviewer: Do you know anything about it?]_

Look, I'm here, and I'll stay here, but you want to know something I wasn't there for? How about no. Or you could just ask Sam... Oh, wait, you can't. Why don't you just hire a psychic? That'd be easier in the long run.

Because let me spell this out for you, shortbus. Even if I did know why Sam showed up at my motel room. I. Would. Not. Tell. You.

 _Robert Singer:_

I stayed with the boys for about two weeks, until I couldn't stand it for another damn second. All they did was fight, and when Sam wasn't researching Dean's powers, he was arguin' with Castiel. Uriel refused to even speak to Sam anymore. And then there were the phone calls.

Like we didn't all know who Sam was calling.

The only thing that came out of that was a map that Sam dug up from under the church. He'd done his research, and he'd read Revelations four dozen times, and then he found a map of the US dating back to 1845 and began putting pushpins in it. I still don't understand it, maybe Ruby helped him some, but he'd found a way to tell where the demons were going to break seals.

All in America, which I'd say was strange, kind of ethnocentric.

Sam even managed to be civil with Castiel long enough to ask him about it, and the angel said that, yeah, that looked about right. Then they went right back to fighting.

Not that Dean was any better.

Harrell kept trying to talk Dean into being at a church service, kept trying to convince him that it'd be a great idea to help get the message out. I've heard a lot of bullshit lines, a lot of bull crap and a lot of cons, but this was the worst. Dean already had told them their message: they needed to fight off demons. What did he need to tell them more than that for?

Had to get away from all of 'em. From the Winchester boys, too damn co-dependent, the both of them, from that crowd of people, from the angels. The wings were the only ones with a bit of sense, they kept talking about how Dean needed to raise his army and Harrell seemed to think that was the church. I wasn't convinced, and the angels weren't saying one way or the other.

The only thing they were clear on was that Dean needed to do _something_ quick or it'd be too late to do anything.

I had some books back home about powers like Dean had, so I said my goodbyes, told the boys how to reach Ellen in case they couldn't get a hold of me. Half way back home, I turned on the radio and there was Harrell preaching away, and then Dean was talking. Damn fool.

I've seen snake oil salesmen who were more genuine than Harrell.

 _[Interviewer: Did you know when Sam left Dean?]_

I knew. Dean called me, ready to drive straight to my place. Wanted to know if I knew where Sam was. If Sam had come by.

I told him no, hadn't seen Sam since I left Las Cruces. Dean said that if I heard from him, he'd like a call. Not as polite as that, but it was trying times. Personally, I thought that I'd see Dean at my door a few hours later, ready to start a search party.

But when I tuned in, he was back on stage with Harrell like nothing'd happened.

 _Miranda Reyes_ :

It took about two and a half weeks to put together the whole story. All in all, it was about an hour long, but we split it up into fifteen minute segments and ran it every two hours for a day.

I don't want to sound like we were the only ones who knew that Dean and Sam weren't Dean and Sam Moore, but the FBI was still maintaining that Dean and Sam were dead – burned up in an explosion, the state police were saying that Dean had died in Saint Louis, and the local police? Well, they were doing crowd control for the daily meetings.

You have no idea what it's like trying to get 10,000 people into the same place at the same time.

The story was as thorough as I could make it – we got in some interviews with Dean and Sam's school friends, some interviews with neighbors and teachers, and a lot of interviews with cops. None of them knew Dean and Sam were Dean and Sam Winchester, but they all knew the photos when they saw them.

Some thought they were FBI, Federal Marshals, a couple thought they were Fish and Game. And they all remembered Dean and Sam showing up about the same time as people started dying. It was a good correlation, but that old saying?

Correlation is not causation.

Because every time I talked to people involved in the case, witnesses and victims, they _all_ said that Dean and Sam had saved their lives. That was the last half hour of the show. Trying to trace them to places they'd been over the last few years.

Lawrence, Kansas. Illinois. San Francisco. Indiana. Michigan... If there's a state these guys haven't been in, I'd be surprised. We got enough people to back up our facts that I didn't need to mention the FBI file.

By the time it aired the first time, the other networks were already playing catch-up and I was pretty happy about that. Gotta admit. It was satisfying. And was Reverend Harrell doing spin. He practically called me a tool of Satan. When I asked him for a comment, Dean just... smirked? I don't even know if that's the right word. It wasn't quite a leer.

And he said, "I can give you a private comment any time, sweetheart."

Harrell bustled him off, but I thought that Dean just thought the whole thing was funny, at least that's the impression I got. Maybe someone else would know better, but he didn't seem too worried about it.

I was proud of the story, don't get me wrong. But I think I thought that it'd _do_ something more. Maybe I thought people would stop believing that he was a saint. I think I thought it'd be like the first crack in a dam: all of a sudden, everyone would start distrusting him, or he'd be revealed as a serial killer, or he'd get arrested.

 _Something_. I thought something would happen.

But it didn't. Harrell gave this press conference after two hours, where he talked about how he'd spoken with Dean and discussed the past and it had "been revealed to him" that all of the things I'd accused him of were lies: all Dean ever wanted to do was save people from evil. If that looked like illegal activities from the outside, it was just because we were all idiots.

Yeah. He got up on his podium, with two hundred or so people behind him and called me an idiot. I'm not going to pretend I wasn't pissed as fuck about that. The story was _fine_ , and he was just trying to spin his way out from under the truth. Dean wasn't the saint that Harrell wanted him to be.

So, yeah, I was pissed and ready to do something mean, but that doesn't mean I lied. I didn't ever lie in my stories. The truth was too good for me to lie about it. Because, maybe all these stories about him showing up when people were dying meant that he was killing off demons and ghosts.

 _Or_ , maybe it meant that Dean was a sociopath who was really good at convincing people that he could save them.

Dean started getting more... cloistered after the story. They moved him into this gorgeous Spanish style house in town, and he got a bodyguard. He didn't go out except for meetings, and we didn't see his brother at all. Sometimes, he'd say something to the press as he was leaving, but he wasn't that... talkative guy from the week after the hospital.

He looked like he wasn't sleeping, and _that_ got talked about, like we could really know anything without installing a spycam.

But... and this is going to sound weird, considering. People were losing interest. My story broke four weeks after the hospital and two weeks after that, we were lucky to get an hour of airtime a day. An hour total. All of us – the networks – were there 24-7, but it just wasn't breaking news any more. There was still job loss all over the place, and the credit card bill, and all of the foreclosures.

And... weirder stuff began happening, or maybe we just began paying attention to it. A town sheriff in Oregon said that he'd killed two ghosts that had been haunting his town for years. I got sent to do the story, just a quick twenty-four hour thing.

Apparently, this sheriff – a guy who probably hadn't been in office more than a year – heard one of Dean's sermons and decided to take care of the evil himself. He tracked it down to a couple that had died in their house. Then he dug up their graves and burned them.

Yeah.

He burned the corpses.

He said to me, completely straight faced, "We're fighting a war here, between good and evil. Damnit if I'm not going to fight for me and mine."

Things like that were happening _all over_. It was the end of the world according to Dean, and America was fighting back.

 _Hannah Jones_ :

We came to Dean by way of Georgia, and then Texas. We had to stop and pick up my sister and her son. But we were there on... oh, I'd say about the middle of February. A few weeks after the Las Cruces miracle.

None of us had that much, and I'd never been a big one for camping, but my sister's son – Chris – he'd been hunting with his daddy a few times and knew how to set up a tent. I don't know what we thought was going to happen. We just had to get there.

I mean, I had to get my sister there. She was pretty sick at that point, and I'd prayed until God was tired of my voice and then I'd prayed some more. When I heard about Dean in New Mexico, I knew it was the answer to my prayers.

So we packed up and went to New Mexico. We had to stop in a lot of diners, and they were all playing the same story: it was about Dean's past and how his last name wasn't Moore, it was Winchester. And he was wanted in just about every state for this fraud or that lie. I just shook my head.

My sister couldn't eat anything without throwing up, so we kept her drinking water, sucking on ice chips. Chris was so good about the whole thing. He didn't think it would work – he kept telling me so, but not in front of his momma. In the end, I think he just went along with it because he didn't want to make a scene.

 _[Interviewer: Did you believe the story on CNN?]_

Did I believe it? Sure. Of course I did. Because weren't some of the most faithful of God's prophets those who'd led troubled lives?

David and Bathsheba, Mary Magdelene, even Adam and Eve. God loves us no matter what, and even if she did eat the apple, He still chose her to bear humanity.

Really, who're we to question if He chose Dean to have his gift?

We got to Las Cruces a couple of days later, we were driving pretty slow on account of my sister. By the time we got there, wasn't a chance of getting a motel room, so we just set up camp with the nearest group of people – it was this little tiny park. Not even a park, really, just a patch of grass with some benches.

I asked around – met the neighbors. They all said the only way to get healed was to go first thing in the morning and put her on the list. "What list?" I asked, because I thought if this boy could heal a whole hospital, why's he need a list to do it?

"Well," said Anamarie. "Used to be that he'd just heal anyone who came along. But Reverend Harrell said that was wearing him out, so now he just heals whoever's on the list."

So, first thing I did, bright and early was rush over to the church. It was... it was this great big span of farmland. You could fit a lot of folks there, a lot of people, but it was all ground together, really muddy. Everyone seemed to be doing things: setting up microphones, making sure the stage was secure. I asked and asked about the list. Finally someone said that the list was already decided.

I said, "Well, who decided it? How can I get my sister on it?"

They said, wait, wait. And I said that well, I did not have time to wait. And then they said that I needed to get an interview with Reverend Harrell.

How I was supposed to do that, I don't know. I went back to get my sister and Chris so we could go to the worship.

We waited for weeks before we got an interview. And when we did... it wasn't with Dean – I knew that boy from daily meetings. Always with such a sweet smile, and he always looked so tired. It was Reverend Harrell and he said that he wanted to help, he really did, but there were so many people ahead of us on the list.

And I asked, "Well, just put us on, we'll wait our turn."

That's when... well. That's when he mentioned that the church needed a more permanent structure. Not like that. I mean, he didn't say it like that, like he was shaking a cup for money. He just said it real casual. He said they were trying to build, and Dean needed our help.

He _said_ Dean needed our prayers to make sure it was finished. But he didn't mean it. He's a man of God, I know that, and I know he just needed our help to do the Lord's work. But I sat there, holding my sister's hand and I almost started crying.

 _Bethany Headley:_

My husband and I were hired to help build the new church. I worked in the office, making sure everyone was settled, making sure that services ran smoothly. He worked the services themselves, sometimes as an usher, sometimes helping people up to the stage.

When Dean moved into his new house, I had to help him get ready for meetings, and make sure he had everything he needed. Reverend Harrell said that Dean was very busy and it was my job to make sure that he didn't want anything. Mostly that was simple – restocking his fridge, making coffee for him in the morning.

But, there were all these maps in his house – I had a key. He gave me a key after he got tired of the doorbell. He was... nice. Mostly I talked with Rich, Dean's bodyguard. He was always around.

In spite of everything, Dean was friendly, and kept smiling, even when he was mad or pissed. Reverend Harrell would spend a few hours every day talking with him, and Dean sometimes seemed to... not get on with him. He'd smile and talk, but he was also glaring at Reverend Harrell.

I started cleaning the house after the first week. Reverend Harrell pulled me aside and reminded me that I was supposed to make sure that Dean had everything he needed, including a house that wasn't a pig sty. After that, I started picking up after Dean, doing his dishes and laundry. I wasn't really supposed to go upstairs, but I did because I didn't want him to think I wasn't doing my job.

There was a room up there that was... all maps and books that looked old. Really old. And cut outs from newspapers. I don't know where he was getting them from, because I delivered the local paper and he hadn't asked for anything more than that. On the maps there were these dots: red dots and blue dots. Also...

There were pentagrams on them. I thought... I don't know what I thought, but I was sitting there with a rag in my hand and I thought that I had to do tell someone. I had to let them know what was going on.

Dean walked into the room, then. He had a gun and it was pointed at me. Really quick, I dropped the Windex and put up my hands. I feel like an idiot about it now, but I was so scared. _Dean Winchester_ had all these evil things in his room.

He lowered his gun and said, "What're you doing in here?"

I don't remember what I said. Probably that I was cleaning and then he said, "You scared?"

I told him I was, and he nodded. "You should be," he said. "This is a map of what we're up against and no one seems to get that it's serious and real."

I was so relieved I could have fallen over. Of course it was a map of the war. Of course. I told him that Reverend Harrell understood it was real: that was why he was helping.

Dean said, "Yeah. Right." And then he pushed me out.

After that, I mostly stuck to doing work at the church. I wanted to be helpful.

 _[Interviewer: Did you control the list?]_

No.

 _[pause]_

No, I didn't control the list. That was Reverend Harrell. I think... I think maybe he should have let someone else do it. Maybe raffled off every day, maybe posted it? Because that's where all the trouble started. With the list.

 **Chapter 7: The Argument**

 _Rich Williams:_

I started working for Reverend Harrell in mid-February. You've gotta understand that part. I was never working for Dean, my paychecks were signed by Glory Church. At first Dean didn't want me around and I wasn't too surprised – the kid was a good fighter. We'd wrestle sometimes just to fuck around, and he was really good.

But I knew a lot more about crowds than him. I worked for Britney on her Oops tour, and I knew that a single guy trying to kill you wasn't the biggest problem: it's the fans. There's so many of 'em and they get really crazy when there's so many. It's not that they want to _kill_ the star, it's that they just _want_ him.

So, I knew about that, and Dean eventually just gave up. He and Harrell had a... discussion about it. I could hear them in the kitchen. They... discussed things a lot, but usually they were more subtle about it.

I moved in, got a shit load of overtime right off the bat for not calling foul over it.

 _[Interviewer: What was it like living with Dean?]_

Pretty much like any roommate I'd ever lived with: he was messy, didn't do his dishes, forgot to tell me when he'd invited girls over.

The angels were pretty freaky the first few times, but I got used to them just showing up. They'd flash in, talk to Dean for a while, and then he'd get pissed and leave or he'd listen to them. Depended on his mood.

I think they didn't really like what he was doing. They weren't too happy, but Dean kept saying that the numbers were worth it. That he was sending people out to watch the seals, that Harrell and him were working on a way to prepare the congregation for war.

Thing is, he wasn't. Harrell sure as shit wasn't working to prepare anyone for war.

 _Hannah Jones:_

We went to every sermon. Every single one. And I didn't know about Sam Winchester until Reverend Harrell spoke to us about evil. May we pray for Sam, fighting off his demon blood, fighting off his true nature.

We prayed every night, and we prayed for my sister, too. Her name was on the list, Reverend Harrell said, but it was going to take some time. It'd take a while for us to get to the top. Just had to have patience and grace.

 _Bethany Headley:_

Oh, Dean was so blessed to have Reverend Harrell there. He'd pray and pray for Sam. We were all happy to pray for Dean. Dean didn't want to admit he needed prayers, I think. He wasn't too happy that Reverend Harrell had asked for him, but that's what being faithful is about.

It's about honesty. And when Reverend Harrell said that he had to be honest and tell us that Dean's brother was the antichrist, I knew in my heart of hearts that Dean would be healed by that. He could be healed by our prayers.

 _Ruby:_

That was so fucking funny I almost fell off my chair. Here's Dean and Sam who don't fight about anything except Sam's demon blood and there's a whole church of Dean's praying for Sam. They didn't get it.

Man. I laughed about that one for days. Sam was pissed, capital P. But, hearing Harrell call Sam the antichrist? Comedy gold.

We were on the run, trying to track down this demon of Lilith's I knew about. A big guy named Rarzel and when we found him, Sam was ready to do a bit of information extraction, but Rarzel says, "Wait, aren't you the antichrist?"

Apparently, he tuned into Harrell's podcast. Sam lost it, yanked him out and sent him back to the depths, but man. Shit was that funny, because Harrell was pretty good for our image when it came to recruiting demons.

 _Rich Williams:_

I wasn't supposed to know about the room upstairs with the maps, but I did. And I also wasn't supposed to know about the girls, but I sure as fuck knew about that. I definitely wasn't supposed to know about the list. I didn't say anything to Dean until the breakdown got pretty bad, and by late March it was a mess.

People who weren't getting on the list were pissed, they wanted to know why, they wanted to know what they were supposed to do. And they wanted Dean to answer their questions. I've worked with a lot of celebrities, and if that kid had the first inkling what was going on in that church, I'd give you my savings account.

After one of the church girls left and I was pretty sure that the angels weren't going to show up, I told Dean we had to talk. He was making himself a BLT and doing a pretty good job of making sure that it was a bacon sandwich with lettuce and tomato. The way he liked sandwiches.

I told him about the people who wanted to know why he wasn't healing them.

"Dude, I do every name on that list. You see me," he said. And I did. He was a mess for a while after meetings. Couldn't stand up on his own. Part of my job was to make sure he got off stage without embarrassing himself.

But, I had to tell him, so I said that people were having a hard time getting their name on the list if they didn't have enough cash to back it up. He looked like I'd sucker punched him.

 _Mary Bishop:_

In late March, 2009, I was possessed by a demon. His name was Rarzel. He'd recently crawled back up from the Pit, after being tossed down there by Sam Winchester. He only had two goals: kill Sam, kill Dean.

 _[pause]_

What more did you want to know?

 _[Interviewer: When did you join Sam Winchester?]_

 _I_ didn't join Sam Winchester. _I_ didn't do anything. Rarzel took me from my home, he stole my car and met with Sam Winchester. And he joined him.

He said... Rarzel told me that it was because he liked the world the way it was. Sam seemed okay. He wasn't like Rarzel. Mean. Cruel.

Sam kind of looked like my younger brother.

After the explosions, there were other things that joined.

 _Miranda Reyes:_

The tape? Oh, yeah, I remember the tape.

There's almost no interest in the story and then all of a sudden, after the first sermon where Harrell called Sam the antichrist, we get lucky. Dean takes Reverend Harrell behind the meeting tent and starts yelling at him about Sam and how he'd told Harrell in private about Sam.

Think about the Christian Bale tape or the David Hasselhoff tape and multiply it by thousand. It was that newsbreaking.

 _[Interviewer: What was Dean saying?]_

He was saying that he was going to leave if Harrell didn't knock it off about his brother. And then Harrell said, simply: If you leave, you can't make sure they're ready for the end of days.

And Dean said, "You mean ready to _prevent_ the end of days."

Harrell said, in what I'd say was his stupidest move to date, that people needed to be ready "to do God's will."

Then there's Dean's rant about how he knows what God wants better than Harrell since he's the only one that talks to angels on a regular basis. And then Dean's bodyguard got Dean back into the car, and Harrell got in the front seat and they were gone.

 _Feliz Wills:_

I would have moved out of town, except that my mom started going to every single one of Glory Church's services. She refused to even think about missing one. The only way I could keep her eating and sleeping normally was to stay in town. Father Damian wasn't happy that she'd stopped going to church, but he was working out of a storefront and he was preaching _against_ Dean Winchester.

Maybe ten people still went to Sunday mass, because in Las Cruces you were either on the Dean Winchester bandwagon or you'd left town.

The only reason I was there for the Last Sermon was because Mom had a doctor's appointment and refused to miss the service. She was cranky and pissed that I was still making her go see doctors, but I didn't want her to get sick and then not notice. So, I was there to make sure that we had time to go to the service, get to the doctor's and get home before I missed a whole day at the office.

Every time I looked at Dean, I thought about his brother. And the smell of evil. Real evil. I wasn't paying attention to the sermon because it was always the same. Evil, evil in America, and then Dean would heal the sick. There were so many people at the services, it felt a lot like Coachella or... I don't know, Woodstock. Thousands of people in a field and Dean Winchester a little speck on the stage.

They had these huge TVs set up so that we could see Dean, and they had a really great sound system.

I wasn't paying attention at all until Dean said, "Today, we're going to cut the crap."

 _[FW laughs]_

He was pretty... straightforward. I guess I wish that I'd paid more attention to him before that, because he seems like a guy I'd like.

 _[Interviewer: What do you remember him saying?]_

Just that today he was going to heal everyone, whether or not they were on the list. That it'd be his last sermon, and if we weren't going to help stop the apocalypse, we'd better get out of the way. Then he clapped his hands together once.

Reverend Harrell - you could see it on the big screens – he was trying to stop him, he grabbed Dean's shoulder and Dean just pushed him off.

Dean clapped again and closed his eyes and then kind of... put his hands out? His hands were facing the audience and then he started shaking, and clapped his hands. It was like a sonic boom. Half the audience fell down, I felt like I'd just missed getting hit hard by a tsunami.

 _Hannah Jones:_

We weren't on the list for that day, but we'd gone to worship anyway. Chris was holding his momma up and he looked like he was about to hit someone if we didn't get on the list soon. He'd been talking to people over at the hospital, trying to get my sister a room, but there were so many sick people in Las Cruces by then. Not enough room for them anywhere.

They'd all come to be touched by Dean.

My sister was there and we were praying, and when Dean said it was the day of healing, I knew we'd been right to come to Las Cruces. Then he started glowing and he said, "Be healed." Just that simple.

And suddenly, my sister was standing on her own again. Both feet on the ground, she was praising Jesus, Hallelujah. We all were.

It must have taken something out of that boy, because he was carried off stage and Reverend Harrell finished the service, praying to God because we'd been healed.

 _[Interviewer: Did you leave Las Cruces immediately?]_

No, no of course not. I know a lot of folks did. Or at least some did, the ones that didn't know their head from their ass. But of course we stayed. Why would you leave after someone did something like that?

The end was here, and our job was to help him as we could. My sister, bless her heart, wanted to pick up a gun and get to the front lines. I sent Chris to find out what we could do.

There was some differences in opinion about the war. Reverend Harrell had had a church before Dean and Reverend Harrell's people wanted to support him when he said that the end was here. At least some of them. But there were other folks who wanted to believe Dean when he said we could fight off the end.

There was a lot of folks in the middle, who believed Reverend Harrell when he was talking and Dean when _he_ was preaching. But, it was pretty nasty between the two camps. Not really obvious at first, we were all civil with each other until the last sermon.

After that, though... well, Reverend Harrell called for a meeting the next day, only he said that Dean wouldn't be there. And we heard that Dean was having a meeting over at the old Catholic church. No question who we were going with, but when we said so at dinner, all those damn Glory Churchers could say was that Dean was trying to lead us astray.

"Astray from what?" I asked. "Astray from his own teachings?"

And they said, astray from God's plan.

 _Reverend Doctor Scott Harrell:_

It was a test. Plain and simple. I tried to tell them that, tried to explain that having faith wasn't abandoning everything as soon as someone said to. It was a test to see who was truly devoted and who wasn't. It was a way to prove yourself to God. And of course we wanted everyone to pass.

There were a lot of people who were so confused by everything going on that they thought Dean meant it when he said that we had to fight the end times. The end times are here: they were always meant to be here. It's God's great plan. We don't question. We follow it.

 _[Interviewer: There were some questions about the list...]_

That was all a misunderstanding. Someone had complained to Dean that they weren't on it soon enough and he listened. The list was always straight forward, I put people on it in the order that they talked to me. I wanted to make sure that Dean was saving the faithful, I wanted to make sure that he was saving the just.

It was all stress and strain. Healing took a lot out of him, he wasn't himself when we had that public fight. When we got back from the church, he'd had time to cool off. Time to get his head on straight and then we sat down and I showed him the list and we discussed it.

Castiel, the messenger of our Lord, said that the healing was good. That Dean was on the path of light. And that's why it was time to test the faith of the congregation with the last sermon.

 _Bethany Headley:_

Before the last sermon, I was in the kitchen with Rich when we heard them... fighting. I think that at first Reverend Harrell must not have liked what Dean wanted him to do. He didn't want Dean to leave. He was so worried about it that they had to discuss it for a long time.

It was a matter of faith, in the end. Despite his doubts, Reverend Harrell trusted. He had faith. And so he let Dean go.

 _Jim Novak:_

According to them, to the angels, using that much power should have broken a normal human. Even Sam, who had a _huge_ amount of power, couldn't have done what Dean did. The angels didn't know what to do with Dean, it was that unexpected.

 _[Interviewer: Did you want Dean working with Reverend Harrell?]_

Did _I_ want? Do you mean Castiel?

I don't know what he wanted. I don't think he wanted Dean and Sam fighting each other. But I don't know.

 _Joanna Beth Harvelle:_

We heard about the last sermon – my mom and me – after the fact. We'd stocked up pretty thoroughly for the end of the world, with all the supplies to last us a year or two. Then about a week or so before Dean healed the whole city of Las Cruces, Sam came to visit. He had a demon with him, but we didn't know that at first.

Mom hugged him: no matter what Harrell said about him, they'd fought demons together. At least that's what she told him.

We thought he wanted somewhere to hide out from Dean, maybe somewhere to lick his wounds for a while. Gotta admit, I was pretty surprised when he said that he wanted us to help him guard a seal. He said that people he trusted were pretty low on the ground and he needed us to check up on this town near the Nevada border. Just to make sure that Lilith didn't have any spies in the area.

Mom said no at first. Didn't want to get involved in any of it. But Sam was pretty convincing. He wanted us to help him save the world, and he made a pretty good case that without our help, humans might lose. So we headed out to the desert. It was just supposed to be a quick trip.

 _Ruby:_

Before Dean went all Touched by an Angel on the general public, Sam said that Bobby had been trying to get hunters behind him and Dean. A lot of them were pretty open to the idea of checking on the seals. Hunters were the only ones who really _got_ that the apocalypse was all work and no play.

Most of them are already pretty Jack Nicholson anyway.

Sam didn't really need them, though. Mostly he was just using them so that he could get Lilith in position. The plan was pretty simple. If he made enough noise, Lilith would eventually have to show up. All those hunters? They were mostly just pots and pans that Sam was banging on.

Kind of a really long game of hide-and-seek he was playing with Lilith.

Once she was out in the open, he could deal with her like she was any other demon. Ding dong, the bitch is dead. At least that was the plan.

While Sam was out playing general with the hunters he could find, I was getting the demons straight. We had a good-sized force. Rarzel had brought a bunch of his friends when he came over to our side. We had maybe half as much as we needed for an all-out assault on Lilith. The problem was that Sam wasn't too happy with the demons.

He was a little eco freak at heart and didn't like the idea of demons using live people as hosts. But, really, we can't all be as eco-friendly as I am. Re _cycle_!

He'd gotten a lot better at biting his lip since Harrell called him out as the antichrist. Smile like you mean it, and the demons lined up to fight with him. Because, let's face it. Earth? Pretty much Willy Wonka's chocolate factory compared to Hell. Sam was our walking, talking Golden Ticket.

So, he'd send the hunters he could get to some of the seals, I'd send the demons to the others, and whoever found Lilith first got the prize of their seal being the home court for the championship finals of apocalypse fighting.

We were so focused on a frontal assault, on something that we'd do – that a _human_ would do, that we missed what a demon would do. Both of us.

 _[Interviewer: What did Lilith do?]_

She set off a series of explosions. Boom goes the cities around the seals, boom goes anything that could stop her from breaking them.

Twenty explosions the night of the last service. It's all so circular, it makes me sick. Because Winchesters can't do anything halfway, so Dean healed a whole city and Lilith wiped thousands of people off the map.

 _[she snaps her fingers]_

Boom.

 _Pete Osgood:_

Sam had come through and convinced me to set a giant Devil's Trap around one of the seals. After I saw what went down in New Mexico, I'd secured my house and I'd started talking to other hunters. We were... connecting more than we had before Las Cruces.

What happened made everyone a little edgy.

I... shit. I think I trusted Sam mostly because of how much crap that Las Cruces preacher was talking about him. As far as he was concerned, Sam was the end of the world. The fact that Sam's only goal seemed to be to save the world made me feel a lot more sure that he was on our side.

God save us from zealots, I used to think.

Me and this other hunter – David Johns, based out of New Orleans, we both went to draw some traps around a seal in the middle of swamp land. It wasn't clean work, we did it in shifts with giant iron bars that we had to bury in the ground. I was out at a junkyard picking up some more railroad tracks when David called me up and said, "There's something going on, Pete."

That was the last I heard from him. You could see the explosions for miles, it looked like a mushroom cloud and that scared a fuck lot of people. But it wasn't a nuclear blast. It was something definitely supernatural. I could smell the brimstone from where I watched it go up.

 _[Interviewer: Do you blame Sam for it?]_

No. Not really. I don't like him, and he's sneaky as a rat, but he didn't plant those bombs. I blame Bobby a little bit for not keeping the Winchesters on a tighter leash. After that, I decided to go home, take the iron I had and protect my house. Later on, I'd figure out that was a good decision when the rebels were running weapons through my property. Iron was more useful than silver back then, and a hell of a lot more valuable.

 _Joanna Beth Harvelle:_

I was there. I don't remember it, because of the brain damage, but I was there when it went up. There's some pictures of what I looked like afterwards, but I don't remember it.

Mom says I was thrown about a hundred feet, broke my neck and would have bled out if she'd taken the shrapnel out of my gut. I guess I'm lucky she didn't.

I remember... I remember coming to with Dean holding my hands. And he said, "You're too pretty to die."

 _[laughs]_

I'm just fucking with you. I remember holding his hand and he said, "Accept the Lord, and be healed."

 _Ellen Harvelle:_

Let's be clear about this, alright? Dean Winchester saved Jo's life. And he did it without asking me who I prayed to, because that boy couldn't care less about religion.

We were working out of Nevada, checking out a seal like Sam asked us to. I'd called up Bobby to make sure that Sam was telling the truth and Bobby vouched for the seals being a key to let Satan out. There wasn't much option after that, so Jo and I packed for a few days and drove down to this ghost town in the southern part of the state.

There wasn't a ticking sound, or anything like that. It was just a smell about a quarter of a second before the explosion. I was in the car, pulling out our supplies, and Jo was walking towards an abandoned bordello when I smelled sulfur and something sweet. By the time I looked up, it was too late. Jo got thrown pretty hard all the way across the road and hit the side of a building pretty good.

 _[pause]_

 _[Interviewer: Mrs. Harvelle? I know this is hard...]_

Sorry, sweetheart, but you have no idea what it's like to look at your baby and know she's dead. Don't try to tell me that you know how hard this is, because you really don't.

I looked at her and I thought she was dead. But when I checked her pulse, it was still there. I could see that her neck was broken, and there was so much blood on her shirt. Some of the glass from the building had embedded itself in her stomach. I didn't touch it, because I knew she'd bleed out if I did.

There wasn't any medical equipment around, like I said, it was a ghost town. One of the doors had gotten blown off in the explosion. I called Bobby as I was getting Jo on the door and he said that nineteen other blasts had hit seals. It was that damn Lilith.

By the time I got Jo in the truck, she was unconscious. I drove straight to Las Cruces.

We kept passing by hospitals, you could see the signs on the interstate, and I could have gotten off at any of them, but none of them would have made Jo able to walk again. Maybe they wouldn't have even been able to save her life. You probably want me to make it sound like I made a conscious choice to go to Dean, but I didn't. I just kept driving and when I hit New Mexico, I didn't even stop to pee.

Dean was at the Catholic church, right were Bobby had said I would find him. It was almost morning when I got there, but all these people were around the church, praying, holding candles. At first they weren't going to let me through because "Dean was still sleeping" but at the time...

It's hard to think about, but I remember thinking that Jo night already be dead and these people weren't going to get between me and Dean. He came out when I started yelling and took one look at me and said, "Where's Jo?"

It wasn't in the church, there wasn't a damn holy light: it was just sunrise lighting him up. Dean put one hand on her forehead, the other right on her stomach over the glass, and he said, "Get better, Jo. C'mon. _Heal._ "

A few minutes later, she was fine. Right as rain, practically ready to join his army right there. As soon as he put his hands on her, as soon as he brought her back right from the brink of death, I knew that I couldn't go back and help Sam, not if it meant going against Dean.

 **Chapter 8: Battlefield Casualties**

 _Rich Williams:_

Las Cruces had turned into a different city. It was a lot more dangerous than it was when I first got there. Dean was pissed at Reverend Harrell, and you could tell. He didn't go to meetings, even though Reverend Harrell kept on having them. It was pretty clear, walking around, if you were on Glory Church's side or if you were on Dean's.

And for about a week, it didn't matter.

Dean'd healed this old girlfriend of his, and they were living in the Catholic church for a few days. Jean? Jan? Jo? Whatever her name was, she was going to be teaching classes all day about how to fight evil.

Everyone in Dean's camp went for it. When I wasn't doing security for Reverend Harrell, I went to a few classes, just for my own education. I saw a lot of people who went to Harrell's services learning how to knife fight.

After a few days, she started teaching... she called it protective runes and exorcisms. Harrell called it "devil's work." And then Reverend Harrell started calling her Jezebel.

 _Reverend Doctor Scott Harrell:_

Joanna was such a bad influence on Dean. He began to stray, she brought sin into his life. I could see that he was losing focus, he was losing his path, she used her body to convince him that the witchcraft she preached was God's work.

We're taught to beware of false idols, and she had put up pagan gods for him to worship, she had pulled him away from his duties to the sick and the needy.

Dean had given me one task, he'd asked me to help him prepare the faithful for the end times. We prayed day and night; we spread the gospel to everyone who'd hear it, and we knew the word was true. We tried to keep his followers on the path of righteousness but it was hard, he was changing.

He was making it hard. Which was the plan, the true plan of our Lord. Faith should not be easy, it should not be something done without thought. Faith is hard, faith doesn't need proof.

We were faithful to Jesus Christ, our Lord.

 _Ellen Harvelle:_

It wasn't violent. That wasn't it at all. It was strained, because that charlatan Harrell set up camp and refused to listen to what Dean was saying. Hell, whatever Dean would say, Harrell would just say Dean was testing their faith.

Dean said, "Get your guns, it's time for war" and Harrell said that he really meant, "Let's sit down and pray."

But Las Cruces wasn't violent, it was just a little town with about three times as many people as it could hold. There wasn't enough food coming in on its own, so different camps were brining it in. And sometimes there wasn't enough money to pay for that food they brought in.

John Winchester didn't teach his boys to starve, and he sure as hell didn't teach them to let anyone else starve.

 _[Interviewer: What do you mean?]_

That's all I'm going to say on the issue.

If I were to guess, though, it was probably the overpopulation more than anything else that brought in the government. There were just too many people, and not enough cops. Maybe it looked a little too much like a revolutionary camp for someone's liking.

And they sure as hell wanted to blame the explosions on someone. Dean was the best choice they had, because you weren't going to hear Senators arguing in the capital about demons. It didn't help that Harrell was all but pointing the finger at Dean.

"Testing our faith," my ass. Harrell wanted Dean out of the way so that he could be the only voice in the pulpit.

 _Robert Singer:_

One of my old friends – a man I knew in Vietnam, who'd become a hunter when he got back stateside – he called me and said that the National Guard was being moved in to get their hands on Dean. I called Dean and Ellen, got through to her and told her what he'd told me: they wanted Las Cruces back to normal and they wanted to bring Dean in for questioning.

That boy wouldn't have stood a chance in a courtroom. I know he would've clammed up tighter than a nunnery before telling the feds anything.

I don't know how they wanted to pin the explosions on Dean, since he couldn't even take a piss without CNN commenting on it. But they wanted them on Dean and New Mexico was getting antsy, all those people setting up camp.

Probably should have gone down myself, but I told Ellen to give me a call when everyone was safe. Just in case he was interested, I called up Sam and told him what was going down. He didn't pick up, but I didn't expect him to.

 _Special Agent Gary Sather:_

I was put on the case immediately after the explosions. We had a task force of fifty people in Washington DC, plus the additional local personnel in the cities affected. At first it was a lot of conflicting reports because of the differences in the attacks.

Some were in major metropolitan areas – the Chicago and San Francisco explosions. Others were in the middle of nowhere. It was a mess. The explosions weren't nuclear, we could tell from the residue from the blasts, but they were big explosions, large enough to take out a couple of city blocks. In the cities, we were able to track down people of interest using different CCTV and security cameras.

There was some change of leadership in the task force, at first it was FBI Director Cooper, then Homeland Security claimed it, then it was back to FBI. And we constantly had new personnel from every agency that wanted in on the information. I had my unit of five people and we focused on the Florida explosion. At first we had two suspects, Pete Osgood and his accomplice.

Then we got a tip from a witness who claimed that she'd seen the person who planted the Chicago bomb. She had a lot of details that we hadn't released – we knew the color of the casing, and that there'd been two packages at every blast site, but that was about it. The bombs were entirely new. Our forensic teams were stumped by the chemical components in the explosives.

The only thing that made the witness any more legit than any other whack-job was that she had those details and she'd been trying to tell the police about it when the bombs went off. From her, we got Ryder.

 _[Interviewer: Tina Ryder?]_

Yeah, Tina Ryder. We were able to track her from where she planted the bomb to the airport and then to New Mexico, and finally to Las Cruces. She wasn't hiding her movements: she even used her own credit card at a gas station outside Las Cruces. Once we knew she was in Las Cruces, we did some research and found several other connections between Dean Winchester and the explosions.

Immediately after the explosions, his lover, Joanna Harvelle, appeared in Las Cruces and began taking part in his cult. We were able to match her DNA to evidence found at the Nevada explosion site, and several people remembered her buying ammunition in the weeks before the attacks. It was enough for us to get a warrant to arrest her and Ryder.

We were planning a raid on Winchester's camp in order to arrest as many as possible, but something tipped them off. By the time we got there, Winchester, Harvelle and most of the people he trusted were gone. Ryder wasn't anywhere in town, and by then the lawyers were already suing us for discrimination.

 _Tina Ryder:_

You aren't going to believe me. No one does. Who'd believe one of the terrorists responsible for the April Attacks?

 _[Interviewer: This is your chance to tell your side of the story.]_

 _[TR laughs]_

You still won't believe me.

When I was in college, I woke up one day and I wasn't myself. I mean, my body was moving and brushing its teeth and everything before I was even awake. At first I thought I was sleep walking or something, sleep washing maybe, but then my body just walked out of the dorm.

I could hear something in my head, it sounded like... hornets. I've had a lot of time to think and I think it sounded mostly like hornets. Constant buzzing, constant sound. And the smell. It was overwhelming, this rotten egg smell.

Look, I wasn't in control. Not the insanity defense, I mean _I wasn't in control._ This demon was inside me, moving me, changing me. And it kept getting orders. It bought this cell phone, one of those disposable ones, and it would talk to its boss, and it'd talk to the other people working on the mission.

It was in charge of planting the bombs in Chicago and Las Cruces.

 _[Interviewer: What bomb in Las Cruces?]_

Yeah. That's what everyone asks.

After I put the Chicago bomb in place, my body got on a plane and went to New Mexico. My body... there was something with the bombs. The usual airport security – dogs, x-ray, all of it couldn't see the bombs. It was like they were invisible. I remember just wishing I could die. I just wanted it over.

I've never understood suicides before. I don't want to sound mean or bitchy, but I didn't get people who wanted to end their own lives. It seemed so cowardly. A chicken way to get out everything that we usually have to deal with. But I was so tired of living, that I was begging the demon to kill me.

Because if I was dead, at least I wouldn't be this out of control anymore. At least I wouldn't be... not me.

Now – well, I guess I'm supposed to be glad I didn't get killed before Las Cruces? I guess I'm supposed to be relieved or whatever. In Las Cruces, I was supposed to set up the bomb at the Catholic church, and I was in the middle of unloading it when –

I don't really know how to explain it.

There was this sucking feeling, like I'd stuck my mouth around a vacuum hose and everything was being sucked out of me, but really it was just the demon. It was getting sucked out of me, and then it was gone.

And I'd pissed my pants and I was crying, but I could breathe on my own again.

I was hyperventilating.

That's how he found me. Dean.

 _[Interviewer: What happened when he found you?]_

At first he didn't trust me, at all. I showed him the bomb and he freaked, made me come with him and take a drink of water. He said it was holy water, but I didn't feel anything. And then he started asking me questions about the demon that had been inside me, what I remembered.

He said that the demon had been talking to Lilith, and I told him that I didn't remember. The hornets.

 _[TR waves her hands near her ears]_

I met... I met two men. They were both dressed in suits and they were so soothing. It was like listening to water. They asked me about the demons and then they talked to Dean for a while.

It turned out – I mean, I learned this later, but it turned out that when he did the last sermon, he kicked the demon out of me. Everyone, Dean, the two guys, everyone he told about it, they all said that it was impossible. But I felt it, I felt it.

We stayed talking for a while. The explosions had already gone off, he'd called people on his phone, and he kept trying the same number over and over. No one picked up. I remember that because I wasn't moving much. I was just sitting there, watching him.

A few hours later, he came in with Jo and Ellen and they helped me get cleaned up. I was still in the pants I'd peed in.

 _Miranda Reyes:_

I don't remember when we started calling it a cult. I think it was before the last sermon, but it wasn't a conscious decision. It wasn't like all of us that had been there for weeks and months got together and decided to stop calling it a 'religion' or a 'movement' and start calling it a cult.

I mean, we'd _talk._ We'd talk all the time in between segments, because there wasn't a lot else to do. And you wanted to know what the reporter next to you knew. But we didn't talk about spinning it at all.

 _[Interviewer: Do you remember who called it a cult first?]_

No. Well. We had some psychologists on a couple of weeks before the last sermon and one of them, Tate Breckman, broke down the psychology of people who had moved to Las Cruces, and he said that it was normal in cult situations for people to abandon all of their possessions to the cult leader. He explained how you went from a completely normal, functioning person, to someone who lives out of a tent and believes that a man can heal people.

That's when our commentators started calling it the "Las Cruces Cult." But, I don't remember referring to it as a cult before the last sermon.

 _[Interviewer: Do you think it was a cult?]_

Yes. Absolutely. People were leaving their lives behind to come believe that this guy could heal people. They were cutting themselves off from their families, from their friends, from everything.

 _[Interviewer: You don't believe Dean healed those people?]_

He healed them. I saw him heal people who were dying, people who were almost dead. He _healed_ them.

That doesn't mean it wasn't still a cult. He was real, but the people who were his true believers were making him into this... fiction. They were turning him into this guy that was bigger than life.

Yeah. It was a cult. Absolutely.

 _Ellen Harvelle:_

We got out of dodge faster than you could say "boo." It was maybe fifteen, twenty people. The ones that Jo had seen doing a good job in the training classes, the ones I knew were helping Dean with strategy.

Dean was quiet a lot after we first got word. He took it hard: I think he’d thought that the government liked him – or at least weren’t investigating him and Sam – because of all the healing he'd been doing.

I got that poor kid, Tina Ryder, loaded into our truck. She was still pretty shell-shocked and I don't know how you fix that. Then I packed up everything we had that we could use: all the food in the church, the camping gear that Jo and I had in Nevada. Anything else I thought we might put to use. It took us about forty minutes to get out of town.

People noticed. Sure, they noticed. But no one saw Dean leave that church, so they didn't make too much noise about it. If he'd tried to leave, even if we'd tried to hide him and get him out, it would have been a four-alarm fire.

Dean gave us the coordinates to meet him at: it was north-east of Roswell, and it took us all a good five hours to get there, but by the time we did, he was already there with Castiel. Don't know how he got there, don't know how he even knew where it was, it was so far off the beaten path. It was a good place for hiding out. Couldn't get there by land too easy, and you'd see any assault a mile off.

Once we'd gotten everyone set up in camp, he sat us all down around a bonfire and told us what he was thinking.

I thought – I don't really know what I thought, or why Jo and I stuck around. Well, I do know about that. Jo wouldn't have left Dean and I wasn't going to leave her.

 _Jim Novak:_

Castiel was pissed. He couldn't be, not really, because Angels don't have emotions, they don't have choice, but he wasn't too happy when Dean said that he was going to fight.

 _[Interviewer: Were those his exact words?]_

Dean said, "This is our home. Let's fight for it."

Castiel didn't want him on a battlefield, because he didn't want Dean killed. I mean, if Dean died? There wasn't any chance to stop Lucifer after that. It was... I guess endgame. There was too much at stake for everyone if Dean died before he killed Lucifer.

In the end, he just helped Dean, because he couldn't say no to a prophet.

 _Ruby:_

Was Sam going crazy because his older brother was wanted by the FBI? Does a freshman fart in the locker room?

Sam wanted Lilith bad for what she did with the bombs. It wasn't a secret that he blamed himself, that he thought it was his fault for getting all those people killed. He started doing more recruiting.

It was... I don't know how to explain it to you. Sam started being able to manipulate demons. Not like a girl who wants a diamond necklace for her anniversary. A whole lot bigger than that.

Sam started being able to control demon's heads. Control what they thought, what they did. We didn't have to torture demons anymore, Sam could just ask and they told him everything they knew and then asked to join his army.

 _[pause]_

It wasn't pretty. But it was war. We were at war. We both made sacrifices.

So, when Sam heard that the FBI wanted Dean, he sent a couple of demons over to take over people working the case. Gum up the works. Make sure that they didn't find Dean.

 _Hannah Jones:_

Chris went with Dean. He talked to his momma and me about it, and we both told him to go to with Dean. I know he didn't want to, but he was strong and he could fight, and more than that, Jo liked him.

He'd been taking her classes because my sister, Suzanne told him to. She wanted him able to protect himself – we used to talk about that a lot. She wanted him able to protect himself in case he had to. And that Jo, she was nice enough, he used to talk about her and she and her mother came by our camp a couple of times for dinner.

Ellen Harvelle had a good head on her shoulders: she used to remind me a little of my mother. She had that strength in her. Once she told us a little about Dean's father. I think that she knew Dean the best out of all of us and no one even bothered to ask her what she thought of his plans.

After Chris and the rest of them packed up and left, it was a little lonely in camp. But we'd talked about it with Ellen before – a few days before they had to leave. What we should do if we ever did leave camp. Back then it was all theoretical. But while Chris was out fighting, my sister and I were working on learning how to cook up some protection for people who weren't fighters.

Ellen showed us how to do that: help people that shouldn't be involved in this mess. She'd kind of nod at us and tell us that this is what we could do. She wasn't a fighter either, she was people, too.

We were planning on leaving the day after Chris did; we were gonna make our way back towards Texas and help those people we could. Spread the gospel, give salt to people who needed it.

Only, the next day, probably early, early that morning, the government moved in with all the power of a mallet being used to kill a mosquito. I was glad that Chris and Dean and them got out when they did. Because we were put under some pretty strict rules right away. They called it 'martial law,' but it was really more like one of those cities you see on the news with some army sitting in it.

We had curfews and we were supposed to register and check in with different social workers to see if we were legal or not. And they were looking for Dean even though he was long gone.

Of course Suzanne and I talked to the other people there. A lot of Dean's followers were confused, and Reverend Harrell was up there preaching away. They took down Glory Church's tent, said that we couldn't have services any more, but Reverend Harrell just posted his meetings on the internet instead.

Anyway, Suzanne and I went from camp to camp when we could, making sure that everyone – Glory Church or Dean's people – had the tools to survive. Salt and runes and ways to tell a demon from people.

It was hard to get around, but soon we had ten, maybe fifteen people who'd go camp to camp every day.

 _[Interviewer: Was that how the underground started?]_

I don't think you know what it was like, sweetheart. We didn't call ourselves the underground or the resistance. That was the media that called us that. We were just people. And we were just trying to get out alive so we could do some good works.

 _Vicki:_

 _Sam sent me to possess an FBI agent so that the FBI didn't get close enough to catch Dean._

 _  
_[Interviewer: Why were you working with Sam?]_   
_

Well, I didn't really have a choice. I mean, he made me.

Before Sam was born, I worked with Lilith, and I liked that gig a lot. She's pretty fucked up – she used to do this thing with humans. She'd choose a kid, usually a little girl because no one looks at little girls, and she'd possess her and then kill off her family, one by one. It was brilliant. I mean, watching that was like taking a master class in pain.

Then the miracle happened and we got a lot more demons that had been on the fence. Everyone wanted in on the side that wasn't God. I was in charge of making a lot of noise in Yankton to distract Dean and maybe the angels.

Sam wasn't even on the register. You still got some demons who were siding with him because he was saying that he could get us out of this without letting Heaven or Hell win. We actually lost a couple of big names to him. Rarzel and Crocell, a couple of other minor dukes.

Anyway, I was in Yankton, and then I turn around one day and Sam just reached out for me and _twisted_. All of a sudden, I wanted to do things his way. It just made more sense. So, I did.

I possessed this young FBI agent named Brian Landrino. He'd get reports that could have been useful and I'd just drop them. I spent a lot of time playing solitaire on his laptop. Eventually Terrence joined me and we had fun for a while.

The point was, the FBI couldn't have found Dean even without us, but we did keep Sam pretty safe and we slowed them down even more.

 _Mary Bishop:_

I don't think Rarzel even noticed when I broke my back. Demons don't use bodies the way that we do. To them, we're just toys that they use until they get bored and then they throw us away for a newer model.

Rarzel liked Sam. He hated Ruby, but she was in charge and he pretended to listen to her, and then did whatever he wanted.

 _[Interviewer: Why was Rarzel working for Sam?]_

After he dragged himself out of the depths? Because he was going to kill him. If he'd thought he could've killed Lilith, he'd still have been working with her, but he knew Sam could kill her. So he was going to do everything he could to make sure that Sam killed Lilith and then he was going to kill Sam.

I mean, I was. He was going to use me to kill Sam. Because Sam could stop any demon, but he couldn't do the same to humans. The deal was, I'd shoot Sam in the head, and Rarzel would let me go.

I don't know if it would have worked. Maybe it would have. But Rarzel started buying into Sam's deal. He started thinking that Sam was right. Or maybe Sam started making Rarzel think Sam's way was the right way. It's hard to tell with Sam, what was real and what Sam wanted them to think was real.

Ruby used to make all of the major demons meet. We'd all get together with maps and runes and she'd tell us how we were going to finish off this demon or that army. She was the one who really knew how demons worked. Sam was the power, from what I could tell. Because she'd suggest that we try to get this demon on our side and he'd _squint_ at the demon and suddenly the guy wanted to be Sam's new best friend.

We didn't talk about Dean. Ruby, the other demons, they all talked about "the armies of Heaven." Phrased like that. It took me a while to figure out they meant Dean.

 _[Interviewer: Did you talk to any other humans?]_

There weren't any humans with us. It was just demons. And the hosts, we couldn't talk to each other. I'd recognize them if I saw them today, but I don't know anything about them. I don't actually know a whole lot about the demons either.

Ruby kept everyone on a tight leash. No talking outside of class. She was sharp. A lot sharper than anyone thinks. I know everyone thought it was Sam, but he was feeding off her, a lot of what he did was because she thought it'd be a good idea.

It makes me wonder about Dean, you know? Who was behind him? Because it didn't sound like humans were in control of anything. We were just pawns in this game that Heaven and Hell were playing.

 

 _Vicki:_

The gates of Hell were closed. No new souls in, no new souls out. They hadn't been closed since... well. They'd never been closed. There were all these rumors about Sirathel finally choosing a side.

Sirathel was pretty badass – he didn't just shuffle people off to different levels, he _controlled the gates_. That's like, being president of... well, maybe not the U.S., but some other real country. Like France.

Canada, maybe.

Anyway, the gates, they were supposed to be neutral, and if he chose a side, if he closed the gates, that was big news. Not good news for Sam Winchester. Because that means pissed off souls, which means pissed off ghosts. Not to mention, it made you wonder if he was keeping things out of Hell or keeping something in.

 _Mary Bishop:_

Rarzel knew about the gates before anyone told Ruby. He knew something. And he was keeping quiet about whatever it was.  
 **Chapter 9: The Army**

 _Miranda Reyes:_

CNN wanted me to stay, so I stayed with the story.

Las Cruces turned into a totally different town. The National Guard had moved in, and there was a curfew and they were filtering people out of town, but it was a really slow process. We did the usual brutality stories – cops beating up kids, National Guard starving encampments. We also did a lot of updates on what Glory Church was doing.

Reverend Harrell was back in Phoenix, but he was still broadcasting. Which left a lot of his followers stuck in town.

The big question, though, the thing that everyone wanted to know, was where Dean was. A lot of people reported seeing him, there was a few times we were sure we'd found him but it'd turn out to be a hoax or someone that looked a lot like him. Then, we'd get the real crazies who'd say that they saw him in toast or in the bruise of an apple.

Crazy.

 _[Interviewer: When did you first find out about the underground?]_

A lot of camps that had been cut off by the government were still getting food. The people in charge thought that if they starved out the migrant population, the people would leave and go back to wherever they came from. But, they weren't starving or leaving.

So, we suspected there was an underground. But we didn't find out until a few months after Las Cruces had been put under martial law that the underground was also working with runes and magic.

 _[Interviewer: And when did you find out about where Dean was?]_

You're trying to tell this all out of order. Las Cruces was put under martial law. Then we found out Dean disappeared and there was a warrant out on him and some of his followers. Then we found out about Iraq. Then we found out about Dean. _Then_ we found out about the underground.

 _Joanna Beth Harvelle_ :

 _It isn't as crazy as it sounds. Hunters aren't an army. They're good in a fight, but they don't know the first thing about working together or working under any commander. They don't even like each other half of the time._

 _I guess what Dean wanted to do wasn't that unreasonable. He wanted to take an army we already had, and use it here, where we needed it. Instead of all the way across the ocean in a war that wouldn't mean anything if Lucifer got free._

 _We knew where the seals were because of the April Attacks, and most of them were in the U.S. I think there was one in Mexico. Two in Canada, along the border. Don't ask me to explain why. Castiel didn't even have an explanation, just said something about the numbers._

 _Not everyone agreed with it, and there was some pretty vocal protests, but also there was a lot of people that just wanted to have some real support. There were about twenty of us, and maybe nineteen seals? Less every day._

 _  
_Thomas Moretti:_   
_

I was stationed in Baghdad. Initially my unit was in Afghanistan, until we were used in the surge in Iraq. It was one neighborhood at a time, they kept telling us. But each neighborhood was just as dangerous. I mean, the "Green Zones"? Fuck, most of the time green meant go for the terrorists.

We were oscar mike in Baghdad, going through a street that we'd lit up the day before, when all of a sudden – and I mean sudden – we weren't in Iraq any more.

Still in the desert, but not even in the same fucking continent. I have to admit, first reaction was to call down some smoke, but then I saw the angel.

I'm Jewish, you gotta get that. I haven't read the Torah in a while, but I got eleven hundred dollars for my bar mitzvah, and it's what goes on my dog tags. So, I wasn't one of those guys that finds Jesus because someone else is trying to blow him up.

Anyway, like I said, I'm rusty on my Talmud, but I don't remember anything about an angel showing up with a flaming sword, saying the end times are _now_ , so get your ass in gear, soldier.

 _[Interviewer: Is that what happened?]_

Kind of. There were all these rumors about Dean Winchester over in Iraq. He'd blown up a prison with his mind. He'd miracled a whole lake of water into wine. This crazy sergeant claimed that his mom sent him a letter that his baby sister got healed of cancer by Winchester. A lot us got mail talking about it, and it was all over the radio that there was miracles going down in New Mexico.

When you've got dust in your eyelids and an M16 in your hands, it's a little much to think that some magician healing people with his magic fingers is something that relates to your life at all.

So, when we first popped up in the middle of the desert, we could see some cars and tents a few klicks away, but right up close we saw Dean and the angel. The angel was glowing, his whole body was white, and his eyes were this brilliant-

It's like he looked inside me and he saw everything I'd had to do since I joined up, everything I'd ever said, every shell I'd ever shot off. And he just didn't care. He forgave me or something, I knew.

He said, out loud, "I am a messenger of the Lord, and this is his prophet, Dean Winchester, son of Mary, child of John."

And Dean says, "That war over there doesn't matter, there's something here that's more important."

The way he explained it, it was more important. It was the end of the fucking world, ma'am. Nothing more important than that.

Dean said, "It's your choice. You know what we're up against. You can stay here and fight, or you can go home."

My whole unit stayed. What were we supposed to do? Go home and hope when the world ended we'd miss it? Fuck that.

 _[Interviewer: Was there anyone who was unsure?]_

A lot of the guys weren't sure at first, but the angel... If he looked inside you, you remembered it, ma'am. No one was going to say no to him.

 _Jim Novak_ :

Dean Winchester wanted an army. After Dean brought the soldiers here, Castiel made sure they were open to the message Dean had.

 _[Interviewer: How did you do that?]_

He introduced Dean, and just...looked into each man's soul. A lot of the soldiers struggled with the war they were fighting. According to Castiel, at least. I couldn't see what he did, no mortal could.

But... I could see that they all understood the war Dean was fighting.

 _[Interviewer: You mean, you made them understand the war.]_

Dean wouldn't have let Castiel... twist the will of anyone else.

 _Bethany Headley:_

Oh, it was the Rapture. They were raised to Heaven before the end times, just like Reverend Harrell said they'd be.

It was the fourth of Dean's signs to come true. Reverend Harrell preached on it.

 _[Interviewer: What were Dean's signs?]_

Well, everyone knows that.

 _[pause]_

First, that the end times will show themselves with attacks by demons. That was what happened in the April attacks. That one came true right away.

Then, good people would be hurt, and bad ones saved, because the war wasn't fair. That one was that school in California that was blown up in the April attacks when none of the prisoners in Missouri were killed even though the bomb was just outside the prison.

Enemies are all around us, that was another one. Enemies surround us, and you cannot tell friend from foe. That's why the FBI went after Dean – because they couldn't tell friend from foe.

There's a lot of other ones, you want me to go on?

 _[Interviewer: /gestures for BH to continue/]_

Ok. You sure? The important one is that the end times would show signs. So when faithful soldiers started being raptured, we knew it was the end times. Every American soldier fighting in the Middle East was gone and no one knew where they were. There were rumors later, that Dean had kidnapped them to fight for him, but that was just rumors.

The truth was that they'd been lifted into Heaven. That was a sign that the faithful were being saved and that we had to wait, and pray until it was our turn.

It was hard for people to do that in Las Cruces, because all of the problems we were having getting food and water. Since the government had closed down Glory Church, we didn't have that infrastructure any more. There wasn't anyone running the central office. It was hard for a lot of people to understand that we had to make sacrifices for the end times.

Hannah Jones was really helpful. She made sure that we were all eating something, and that no one was sick or hurt. The National Guard didn't understand that, or they wouldn't have arrested her. She was just trying to help.

 _Ellen Harvelle:_

What did we know about having 150,000 soldiers in our camp? We were twenty people, and it took two days for him to pull everyone out of Iraq, and by the end he could only drink water and sleep. A couple of people that saw him pull that Last Sermon stunt said he was about the same after.

About a third of the soldiers he pulled back to us stayed, the rest went home or back to their base, or just away. The angel scared the hell out of 'em, and I know none of 'em could have remembered their way back to our camp because of Castiel. We didn't keep any of the officers – the generals and colonels and majors – and when they left Castiel said something to 'em and they all had a pretty blank look on their faces.

Uriel said that he would watch them, and then he was off. That was still 50,000 people we were taking care of all of a sudden. We didn't have food or water or tents, but we had an army.

They were pretty good at organizing themselves, went into their units and made little camps, and we sent some into the two nearest towns to buy food and supplies. It wasn't enough – it couldn't be, but it was enough for a couple of nights. After that, Dean said they'd be on the move and they could find food and supplies along the way.

That boy – both him and Sam – they'd been living so long by their wits that they didn't know the first thing about paying for anything honestly. I think Dean thought that no one working with him would have any sort of problems with legal and moral questions.

A lot of the soldiers didn't. They'd just come from a war zone, they'd done things that most of us wouldn't be able to. But, we lost a lot of 'em because of the things not even related to fighting that Dean asked 'em to do.

 _Chris Jones_ :

Most of the women stayed. Most of the medics, a lot of NCOs.

 _[Interviewer: Why those specific people?]_

I don't know. No idea. Maybe they were used to fighting an enemy and also your own unit a little? I don't know. I've never been in the military.

 _Thomas Moretti:_

I'm sorry, ma'm, I don't know what you're talking about.

 _[Interviewer: Statistically, almost every woman that was brought back stayed with Dean Winchester.]_

 _[TM snorts]_

Maybe they wanted to fuck him. Maybe they were hot for him.

I do know this. We didn't have any wounded in camp. On their way here, they got healed, came into the US fully ready to fight for Winchester.

Why some people decided to stay and others went home? Maybe they didn't care about the word ending.

 _Miranda Reyes:_

It was a bloodbath. Once soldiers started disappearing, every warlord that wanted a piece started taking back their territory. There were several thousand UK troops in Afghanistan, and they were killed because they couldn't get out of the country fast enough. A lot of reporters and aid workers were killed before they could get on a plane out.

Danny – the CNN reporter – got in this Jeep with the camera guy and their producer and they hid in the back under a tarp while their translator drove them over the border to Turkey. In the report he did later, Danny said they drove without headlights for miles, just so that they didn't attract any attention.

No one knows – there's no way to tell how many people died between when the soldiers relocated and now. From what we can tell – the country is split between ethnic divides and local warlords. Afghanistan is even worse.

Thousands? Hundreds of thousands? A lot. A lot of people died.

At first, President Obama shut down the stock exchange for four days, and declared it America's top priority to find and punish those responsible for the disappearances. I don't know when he found out that they were all here, but CNN had a source that told us that the American military was back on American soil within 48 hours.

We broke it, beating Fox News and CNBC. Eric Cantor, the Republican Whip, went on TV and said it was a 'cheap shot' by Obama. They thought he'd brought the military back without telling anyone. Nancy Pelosi fires back with her speech about Republicans refusing to support our troops.

And _still_ none of them realize that something really odd is at work here.

 _[Interviewer: How did you find out how the troops got back to the US?]_

I watched a local newscast that interviewed Jackson. I knew him from the story I did in Iraq, and in the interview he explained that he'd been brought back to the US by Dean Winchester to help fight the war against demons. It was the first interview with a returned soldier that anyone got, and we all were a little bit startled. None of the returned soldiers could remember where Dean was, though.

Harrell said that the whole thing was fabrications made by the government to disguise the truth – that American soldiers had been Saved and Raptured into Heaven. He said anyone pretending to be a soldier returned from Iraq was just an actor hired to fool us all. A lot of people believed him, a lot of people thought that it was God's will all these people return to American soil, but there were also lot of us who just had no idea. We didn't know what was going on.

 _Vicki:_

Terrence and I had these bets going. It was a lot more fun than my old job. We'd bet something like, "who could get a team to Alaska faster" – he won that one by faking a Dean sighting. I won this one about who could convince the National Guard to interrogate someone's grandma. It was really smart: she was running an underground, providing food to other camps and also drawing some traps that kept Terrence and me from Las Cruces.

Anyway, we got her to headquarters and the agent in charge was asking her all the usual questions, where was Dean, how was she getting supplies, Terrence had money on the ACLU breaking in before anything interesting happened. Personally, I thought they'd lock her up forever and throw away the key.

We were both wrong. Sam called and said that he'd heard we had someone working for the underground and he wanted to talk to her. It wasn't hard: we picked her up and left with her, dropped our meat suits as soon as we could and grabbed new ones so that no one would recognize us.

It took us about a day to catch up with Sam and as soon as we did, he sent us right back to the feds.

 _Ruby:_

Sam wanted to know how his brother was doing, it was that simple. He thought that if he could talk to Dean, they could work it out. The idiot thought that if he could just talk to the _resistance_ they'd figure out he wasn't such a bad guy and take his side.

After he talked to that woman that the FBI had, he figured out it wasn't that simple. She saw me and started chanting an _exorcism_. It was hysterical: like watching a blind kid run into a wall. They talked for maybe two hours? And all he convinced her was that he was working with demons, and Dean wasn't.

She asked if he was holding her prisoner, and he said no, so she left. After she did, Sam called Bobby, told him that she needed help. Bobby isn't any better than the Winchesters about hard luck cases. Tell them a sad story and suddenly they want to bake you cookies and draw salt circles around you.

 _Hannah Jones:_

Inside, I'm sure that boy just wants to do right.

 _[Interviewer: Sam Winchester?]_

Yes. I'm sure he does. But so did Judas. He thought that we were working towards the same goal, at least that's what he said. But I know what Dean said, and that was that the only free Earth was one free of demons. Sam wanted to use demons to help us stop Lucifer.

 _[HJ sighs]_

He let me go, and I tried to get back to Las Cruces, but the furthest I got was Alamogordo, the roadblocks kept me out. When I tried calling Suzanne, her cell phone had been disconnected. I was almost ready to charge down there on foot when Bobby Singer drove up.

Dean had talked about him, he'd said there wasn't a better hunter alive. And the man knew how to be polite. After we met, he helped me get in and out of Las Cruces a couple of times – we got nearly fifty people out and then we scattered, starting our work.

 _[Interviewer: What work?]_

We had to help people prepare to defend themselves. And we had to spread the word.

 _Chris Jones:_

I hadn't heard from my mom or my aunt since we left Las Cruces. They were both good at running things on their own, but this whole world...

I thought. I thought that since he had his army, Dean wouldn't need me. About a week after the army showed up, I packed up my bag and said that I was going to leave. Jo was the only one I really wanted to say goodbye to. She was great, I'd learned more than I thought I could from her.

When I said goodbye to Dean, he looked at me, and said that family was more important, that I had to go find them and keep them safe. Then he handed me this leather bag about this big.

He said not to open it until I found my aunt. I didn't. All this shit had gone down and what were you going to do if you didn't trust Dean?

 _Ellen Harvelle:_

We lost half the people from Las Cruces after the military showed up. Dean had bigger things to think about than losing a few people, he was deciding who was going to lead this new army of his. A few of the Las Cruces people had some training: they worked with the troops.

Jo got a reputation as a ball buster.

Dean divided the seals up. Some of 'em had specific places, others were a little more vague. The troops were monitoring the air waves, making sure that the brass didn't know where Dean was. It took Dean about a week and a half to divide everyone up and the boys – the soldiers – were getting pretty antsy by the end of it.

I wouldn't have thought that men like that would just switch sides and start following Dean the way they did. But, it happened, and Castiel _says_ that he didn't do anything.

The day before everyone was set to move out, another angel showed up. I was in the middle of showing one of the units how to pack a good rocksalt shell when we heard the wings. It was a little girl, looked like she was maybe eight, black hair, blue eyes. For a second, I thought she was Lilith.

But, Castiel looked at her and then he was on his knee, bowing. He said something to Dean, and Dean didn't bow, but he looked like it made more sense that his second was groveling. The three of them went into Dean's tent and talked until after dinner.

Jo was running some demon fighting drills when Dean called all of us – all the people he talked to regularly – into a meeting. He had all the soldiers he was going to have leading his army in there already, and none of them looked like they understood what was going on. They never really did, even later when they were facing down demons with salt and holy water.

Dean looked right at me when he said, "Gabriel knows how to rebuild seals."

 _Jim Novak:_

Castiel had bosses. He had superiors. He was a messenger of the Lord, but he wasn't an archangel. When Gabriel came to the camp, I got these flashes. We'd... been together for so long that sometimes a little of his memories would bleed through.

I saw a battle. A really long time ago. Sometimes I think that I really was crazy, that I really didn't see what I did, I just imagined it. But, I don't know how I could've imagined that. It wasn't like a movie, it was like I was there, slaughtering other angels.

Fallen angels.

Castiel remembered Gabriel tying the first seals. He remembered it really clearly, but he didn't know how Gabriel had done it. Just that what happened after? What Gabriel had become? It was...

It wasn't right. Castiel didn't feel a lot of things, but he felt hurt by what had happened to Gabriel. Because God hadn't done anything to stop it.

Gabriel offered them a solution. I remember it pretty clearly. He said that they could form new seals using Dean's powers, and they'd be able to stop the war that way. Castiel agreed and Dean said to go for it.

But when Gabriel reached into Dean to draw out something to bind the seal, he went flying. And not the way that Castiel did, but he was slammed across the room and this... light, it just poured out of Dean, poured out. Castiel and I went flat on the ground to try to get away from the glow.

Afterwards, Gabriel said that it was because Dean had a direct connection with the Lord. His power was tied to God's. Castiel offered up his grace instead. I knew what it meant. It meant that I might be free some day, if Castiel got weak enough.

 _Mary Bishop:_

The angel? I don't know his name – Rarzel never used it. He called him "Messenger." I don't know what the game was, it only made sense to the two of them. They'd meet at a public place, like a museum or a restaurant, talk about the war and then they'd trade things. A lot of times, it was stuff I didn't understand – they traded a lot of names. Sometimes, it was stuff that was pretty obvious.

Rarzel had a sword that he didn't like to leave anywhere for long. When he first possessed me, he took me to this abandoned building where he'd hidden it. He used to practice with it when Ruby wasn't around, because he didn't want her to know he had it. It was a demon-killing sword - he told me that he'd killed a whole legion of Hell with it.

A while after they'd started meeting, Rarzel took the sword along. I thought he was finally going to kill the angel.

But when they sat down at the table, the angel said that Heaven was 'binding him new seals with their grace.' And then Rarzel started laughing. The angel didn't, he was dead serious. He looked like – well, if he could. I think if he could've he would've been crying.

"Would this make it easier?" Rarzel asked him, like he was talking about the weather, and he offered the angel his sword.

The angel said that he knew it hadn't been lost and that he could use it. It was creepy how he seemed so sad and so glad at the same time – but they were always creepy. I don't know why Rarzel trusted the angel. He could have killed him as soon as he got the sword. But he just left. Maybe he thought Rarzel was a good source of information. That's what Rarzel thought about him.

He used to brag to me that no other Duke of Hell had an angel owing him favors. Like I cared.

 _Miranda Reyes:_

A lot of stations were getting interviews; I interviewed a few guys myself. They were all pretty confused about how they got from Dean to wherever they were going – home or their base or wherever. But they all remembered Dean, and they all said that he was fighting.

What I wanted was the real scoop: what about the soldiers that were still with Dean? I wanted some of that. Jackson was my first lead. He said that he didn't know where Tom was, but if he heard from him, he'd give me a call.

He'd left his unit to see his family, and when I talked to him, he was really pissed at himself.

After about a month, he called me and said that he'd heard from Tom. Tom had needed some cash and a place to stay with the rest of their unit from Iraq.

I almost got there too late, the unit was on their way out, but Tom stopped and said, "Looking for a story?"

He was the first guy in Iraq to take me seriously, and I owed him my life a couple of times over. But I think he wanted me there, he wanted me to tell the story, so I climbed in back and we took off. It was this old Chevy van, one of the delivery ones you see with magnet logos on the side.

Tom wanted to talk, I think, and he introduced me to the unit. Jackson was with them; he said that it had been a retarded move to walk away from his brothers when they needed him.

Later I'd find out where we were going. At the time, I was just glad for the hand-held video camera.

 _Joanna Beth Harvelle:_

Castiel needed to be at every site that we wanted to ground a new seal. Until we found any other angels willing to donate to the cause, we were going to use his grace. It was tricky, so I sent out the first wave staggered. If they got to their mission and then had a few hours to stand around, Lilith might get curious.

The first seal went off perfectly. I got a phone call and then digital photos from Alpha 1 – they insisted on using this military language instead of names.

The second seal took longer, so I told Alpha 3 to circle in to the seal, do a quick survey of the area.

 _Ellen Harvelle:_

I'm proud of her. She had a quick mind for the military strategy.

None of the soldiers respected her the way they respected Dean, and we all knew what they said about her behind her back, but that wasn't the point. She was quick and she was good at her job; Dean didn't have time to plan out all of the missions, he barely had enough time to shit.

There was some news from Uriel that other angels were wary about binding their graces to make seals. He said that Gabriel was still searching. So Jo sent out Castiel again and again. In the end they made about ten seals over a couple of weeks.

The last unit they sent out was the one that went so wrong, the one with the reporter. No one could have prevented that, Jo shouldn't blame herself.

 **Chapter 10: The Underground**

 _Ruby:_

They were fucking assholes is what they were. One of our people – this demon from the pit named Fael had possessed a recruit to try to get closer to them. Sam wanted to know what was going on; it was stupid, I told him so.

But, 'Stupid' is the Winchesters' middle name.

Of course they caught him – Fael. With angels in the camp, he didn't stand a chance. We just thought they'd kill him.

They didn't.

First thing we heard was his screaming. Astral screaming – we were miles away and still heard it. They were teaching the soldiers how to discorporate demons, and they had a test dummy in him. Every time he'd get kicked out of the body, he'd claw his way towards us and then the angels would drag his ass back to his body. It took days. Finally, Sam killed him when he showed up in our camp.

Mercy killing.

That's when Sam got serious about fighting Lilith. He didn't want to wait for her to bring the war to him any more. Now he was taking it to her. Every demon sighting we heard, he was there, bending when he could, ripping them out when he couldn't. Every little girl that got possessed, he locked it in a trap and interrogated it.

I'd say that he didn't want the human soldiers anywhere near this battle, but when's it ever that simple with him? I think at that point it was pride, or his daddy issues. He wanted to kill Lilith before Dean did.

 _Mary Bishop:_

The battles were insane. Demon-on-demon violence is like a Mortal Kombat game, everybody just tears at each other until there's nothing left of the host. Arms, legs, the neck. I saw a demon rip out a woman's lungs. They’re mushy.

Mushy, spongy stuff.

Rarzel kept me safe. My body, I mean. It wasn't that he liked me, but he wanted to stay on the side in case he had to run.

He said that they had Lilith on the run, that she wasn't even at the battles anymore, because she was afraid that they'd capture her. It was the one time I thought that he was impressed with Sam.  
Every time Rarzel heard rumors about Lilith still being on Earth, he'd get this really nasty satisfaction. Because he knew exactly where she was, and it wasn't on Earth. Finally, Sam caught him out and just looked at him, asked Rarzel flat out where Lilith was. Did that twisting thing.

"In Hell," Rarzel said. He was sullen about it. Sam had scared Lilith back to Hell.

It meant they were winning. But it also meant that they were in their own little world, that they didn't care what happened anywhere else; it was just one battle at a time. One win at a time.

 _Bethany Headley_ :

They – the government - was getting us out of Las Cruces, one camp at a time. Wasn't anywhere to put us once they did. That was the main problem. We didn't have anywhere to go.

A lot of us headed towards Reverend Harrell because he knew what was happening. Some of the others followed Hannah Jones. She'd set up houses for us to stay in, and she offered to let me come with them. They were going to go spread the good word. But I couldn't.

I went back to Reverend Harrell and he found a family that I could stay with until I got back on my feet.

 _Robert Singer:_

They knew a fair shake about hunting. Not a lot, but enough to get 'em killed.

Hannah was smart about it. She knew she wasn't no fighter, and her sister wasn't either. Hell, half of the people probably hadn't ever held a gun in their whole lives. And Ellen knew that when she trained 'em. She only taught 'em things they could use to protect themselves.

There were the other half, though. The ones that would make a pretty good fighting force if it came down to it. I helped 'em learn enough so that they could fight. And Suzanne's son, Chris, showed up a few weeks later.

He sat down and talked with me for a while. I hadn't been able to get a hold of Dean for months now, and the only news I'd heard from Sam was about helping Hannah. When he called me and told me that she was running an underground, I knew that he was still bein' himself. Still trying to do the right thing, damn him.

God save idiots and Winchesters.

 _Pete Osgood:_

I was holed up, wards set up, when I got a call from Jane in Baker County that she had a ghoul problem. By the time I got there, I was pretty pissed off because of the traffic, and I was ready to decapitate something.

Just as I was parking, this young guy comes flying out of the cemetery. Almost dented my car. I dove right in and the two of us killed off the ghouls, but it was a close call for him. Said his name was Chris Jones.

I was about to drop him off at his motel room, but then we got to talking. At the time, I wasn't feeling too warm about Bobby Singer, and Dean Winchester could stay on his side of the country, in my opinion. But Chris was okay.

Young. Sure as hell was younger than the rest of us, but he had some good hunters teach him a thing or two. And he wanted to help people. Way back, I remember Bobby coming to me and telling me that hunters needed to look after people because the angels and demons weren't going to.

Chris said the same thing, and I thought that maybe he was right. With both of the Winchesters full of bullshit, and Bobby Singer helping out in the Midwest, I could help out this kid.

Even if he got himself killed trying to save some folks, at least it'd be something.

 _Ellen Harvelle:_

Most of the camp had moved out. Had to give 'em credit. Once they knew their mission, they knew how to get it done. Dean had sent them to the seals that were left – the explosions had exposed Lilith's hand a little more than she'd intended.

Dean told me that Sam had known where all the seals were, but he took the map with him, and Dean still couldn't call him. Part of it was that he was so mad at Sam for choosing Ruby over Dean, the other part was that I think Dean didn't have a single idea what he'd say to Sam if he ever got him on the phone.

Anyway, because of the explosions we knew where she was going to hit, even if we didn't know when.

And it was good going, building new seals. Dean always seemed busy, and Castiel always seemed tired. Jo wasn't one of the guys, they used to harass her sometimes, but they also thought that she was Dean's girl. That helped, I think.

The first time we got news that something was wrong, I was learning how to fire an M16, Jo came running in – said she needed to find Dean. She looked pretty panicked and the guys reacted to that. They'd seen her face down a full grown demon, so if she was spooked it was something bigger than that.

In the end, she grabbed Dean away from his meeting and we all hurried back to the officer's tent. Castiel was laid out on the floor, in convulsions.

Dean took one look at him and said, "Call all the units, find out who's in trouble."

It was the last unit on the list. They were in the middle of what sounded like a hell of a fight. The other commanders got a unit together in no time, but we all knew that it was at least a four hour drive. By the time we got there, they'd either have won or lost. Dean said that we had to load up Castiel, that he had to come.

Then they left – Jo stayed here to run the base, I stayed here because I'd be no good in a gunfight.

 _Jim Novak:_

Dean healed Castiel on the way to the battle. I don't think that Castiel thought he could do that. Because, according to Castiel, no one should have been able to do that. It wasn't possible.

Except that Dean did it, he touched Castiel and the pain stopped, the feeling of being turned inside out stopped. Castiel started praying, because the only thing that could have healed him was his Father. Our Father, I guess.

When they got to the battle, Castiel was ready to take out anyone with his bare hands. Which was good, because at first it looked like the good guys had won. The army unit had all of the demons hog tied up in devil's traps. And then when Dean's troops got closer, the soldiers turned on the rescue party.

It turned out that the demons... possessed the good guys, and so Castiel had to burn out the demons one by one. It was... slow. And Castiel worked hard. But Dean still got shot. When he was hit, I thought that Castiel was going to break every bone in my body trying to get to him before he fell.

Uriel showed up and took care of the rest of the demons.

 

 _Miranda Reyes:_

I hadn't seen Dean since he disappeared from Las Cruces, and it was a really different world. The explosions might have changed things in Las Cruces, but they'd also changed things everywhere else, too. Military was being used in the cities: now that our boys were back, no one wanted to send them abroad, not when there was all this danger at home.

Dean and the cavalry showed up, with this guy in a suit, and when he touched the demons, they were gone. It was amazing. I thought. I thought we were goners. To be honest.

I'd never been possessed by a demon before. And you know what they say, about trying new things and walking in someone else's shoes?

Yeah. It was like someone walked in my shoes, and then walked in me. It...

 _[Interviewer: It...?]_

Let's move on. Next question?

 _[Interviewer: What happened then?]_

While the suit was getting the demons out of our bodies, Dean was busy fighting off the guys still possessed by demons. He looked exhausted. Worse than after a healing.

And then he got shot. Right in the shoulder, by a guy in Tom's unit. I think that everyone went crazy, then. The suit leapt over the entire fight and tried to catch Dean, but missed. It was like something out of a Matrix movie. I didn't even know real people could do that. He looked pissed off.

Then another suit showed up, in this flash of light, like a sun flare on a camera lens. And everyone was back to normal, any demon that was still in someone was gone. Wham, bam, thank you ma'am.

 _Robert Singer:_

At first, Pete called me just about things I could do to help the resistance. It was nice to help some people helping people instead of having to choose if we were helping angels or demons. He was talking with Pam and they wondered if I had a copy of Revelations they could look at.

I went over the prophecies with them, and it was...

Well.

 _[RS coughs]_

The trouble was that Dean was making a lot of the prophecies come true. Just by living, he was makin' 'em true. A lot of this stuff about bringing together the armies of Earth with the chorus of Heaven to fight the legions of Hell.

At first it was just an idea. We thought that maybe we could talk him out of it. Talk him out of this war. Not that there were a whole lot of other options from his perspective.

That Jones kid, he was a good hunter and he was making some headway helping out folks. People helping people. And Hannah saved more people than anyone but her knows. People from Las Cruces, people that she taught how to protect themselves. It was good solid work.

Anyway. For a while it was just an idea. About Dean and the apocalypse.

I didn't like it. And I wouldn't... there are lines you can't cross. And I wouldn't ever raise a hand to those boys, and I sure as hell wouldn't raise a gun unless it was for their own good. And so, I wouldn't hurt Dean. That's a line, right there, a line in the sand I wouldn't ever cross.

Wouldn't ever want to cross it. It's no excuse, but I didn't think it was his fault, and I didn't want to do it. I was sorry we were even thinking about it. But we were. Thinking about it.

 _Ellen Harvelle:_

They all came back to the camp, and Uriel and Castiel looked fine when they helped Dean plan the next mission. You couldn't tell anything was going on. Uriel said that he'd help Castiel at the next seal. We were going to set one up for something really ridiculous.

Dean's idea. Something that was so dumb it wouldn't ever happen by accident. It was... let me see. Make the only way to break a seal if a pink elephant in Nebraska sat on a nest.

When you think about it, it's not any more arbitrary than killing two reapers or raising some long-dead demon.

I'd never seen Castiel do it, so I wanted to be there, and just when he reached into himself, and pulled out the most brilliant light I'd ever seen, Uriel stabbed him.

Dean went a little bit shy of crazy right then. He'd been hurt when they rescued that other unit, shot in the shoulder. The doctors said he'd be fine, but he was supposed to take it easy. But when Castiel got hurt, Dean reached out with both hands and grabbed hold of Uriel's shoulders.

I don't know what happened, you could ask Castiel. But one minute Uriel was standing there, and we all thought that Castiel was dead, the next... well. It was still the same body, but someone else was behind the wheel.

 _Jim Novak:_

There isn't impossible when it comes to Dean Winchester. Uriel tried to cut the seals, by cutting the thing keeping them together. Which was Castiel's grace. And me. I would have died, too.

I had a lot of time hanging out with messengers of the Lord and I learned a lot of history. Castiel might have talked a good game, but he understood why Uriel chose to try to bring back the devil.

 _[Interviewer: What?]_

 _All of the angels were a little irritated by how we used free will, by what we did with it. I mean, we get to choose thing every day. Every day. And they don't have that option. They don't have to choose PB &J or turkey, they don't have any choice at all. And Castiel got how that could irritate Uriel._

 _The frivolity of our choices._

 _Anyway, Dean knew that if Castiel died, the new seals would go with him. So he reached in and yanked out Castiel and shoved him into Uriel. He took me along for the ride, too, because I don't think he had any idea..._

 _I don't think he understood what he did, it was just chance that he shoved me into Uriel's vessel, too._

 _  
_[Interviewer: What happened to Uriel's 'host'?]_   
_

...I try not to... consider what happened to him. I'm here. Now. I'm here, now. This is my body. And I'm the only one in here.

 _Thomas Moretti:_

Castiel was the angel.

He was our angel, one who was sealing the ties on Lucifer. A lot of the guys thought he was a creepy mofo. I did, too, most of the time. Way too stick-up-the-ass to hang out with us. Definitely a POG.

Right in the middle of sealing it, Uriel – this other angel – pulls out a sword that looked almost like a K-Bar, and stabbed Castiel. Castiel went down and Dean went manimal on us, screamed and grabbed Uriel like was about to take his face off. Yelled, and then Castiel was bleeding out on the floor.

Doc was trying to restart Castiel's heart, trying to stop the bleeding, trying to do everything she could, but sucker was shish kebab.

Then Dean collapsed, and we all had our weapons out and on Uriel, turncoat mother fucker. And he was holding Dean up, both hands under Dean's shoulders. Dean waved us off, said that we could relax, he'd taken care of it.

Wasn't looking at anyone when he said, "This is Castiel now."

Saying it makes it seem even more fucked up and weird than it is. But, shit, FUBAR was happening all the time, and this wasn't any different.

 _Pete Osgood:_

The last straw was when he took control of matters of Heaven – saving that angel and killing another? Dean killed a demigod like it was nothing.

I almost called Sam to see if he wanted to talk to us about containing his brother, but Bobby said that that was a bad idea. So, it was just five of us. Me, Bobby, Pam, Ellen Harvelle, and Reverend Pierce.

We met because someone had to talk about it. We had one chance, one Hail Mary pass to end this war.

We had to kill Dean Winchester.

 _Ellen Harvelle:_

I told Dean and Jo I was going to get supplies and then I hauled ass to Georgia. We met at this little diner where no one knew any of us. Maybe that made us more noticeable, but it was also anonymous.

Not gonna lie, I had an inkling what they wanted to ask me.

Bobby was the one who did a lot of the talking, about the prophecies in Revelations, about how Dean was hitting all the big ones like he was going for a championship. Bobby seemed pretty desperate, like he was at the end of his pretty long rope. But it was Pete with the idea to kill Dean Winchester.

Pam backed him up. Said something about what Dean was doing was tearing a new hole in the world, that a hell of a lot of evil and good could walk through. She said that it made what Sam was doing look like a kid's prank. And she was good, she was a good psychic, probably the strongest one I ever met. She'd lost her eyes trying to summon an angel, but most psychics couldn't have even blipped an angel's radar.

Pete called it a "Hail Mary pass." I said no, I'd already made my choice. Reverend Pierce was with me. Bobby asked me to not tell Dean about their plans, but...

I don't know what he was thinking. Maybe he'd been away from Dean for too long, but killing Dean wasn't the game winner, Dean himself was. Dean was our one chance to get out of this alive. I wasn't going to let them kill him just because Bobby and I had some history.

So I went back and told Dean.

 _Chris Jones:_

 _It was hard to be a resistance member. At first people were just mean, they didn't want your help. My aunt was better at it. But then things got really bad._

 _The government was using the military in American cities. Sometimes I'd run into units and I wasn't sure if they were Dean's people or just military that didn't want to be police. And regular people, the people we were trying to help, they'd kill you if they thought you were a demon._

 _People were dying every day, people were killing each other, and no one said anything because they were all so scared._

 _I went through this town – a little suburb. And I was trying to teach people runes, when – god. They dragged this old woman out into the street, yelling that she was a "demon bitch." I should have said something, I should have done something. They beat her to death with shovels and baseball bats._

 _I was trying to _help_ them._

Pete said to me one day that maybe if Dean wasn't around, all of this would stop. And I'd been to more of the cities than him. I'd seen things that you just can't not see. And I thought. I thought, maybe he's right. Maybe if Dean's not around, people don't have anyone to congregate around.

 _Miranda Reyes:_

Oh, god, DSMJ.

 _[MR sighs]_

"Demons Stole My Job." It was this conservative movement to create anti-demon legislation. It was also an excuse to publicly kill people. It was definitely a church-started movement, I think that Harrell and O'Reilly got on that train early, but the senator that actually proposed it was from Georgia.

The idea was that because demons could hide as anyone, good, hard working Americans were being put out of work by demons. Now it wasn't just illegal immigrants out to steal jobs, it was demons.

And it didn't help anything that the auto industry was going down the tubes fast. O'Reilly got this short of accusing Obama of being a demon sympathizer because he was forcing the auto industry to cut all that fat, all the mid-level managers and car lots.

 _Reverend Doctor Scott Harrell:_

It was a rough time that God brought upon us, but it was also a time of prayer and a time of faith. The faithful were able to tell those true of heart from the sinners and demons among us.

 _[Interviewer: You don't think that any of the vigilante killings were wrong?]_

I think that God was able to tell the saints from the sinners.

 _Hannah Jones:_

No. I didn't know anything about no one trying to kill Dean Winchester.

Lord above, you think I would have let that happen? No, that was some misguided souls. They didn't have anything to do with our movement.

We were out, moving city to city preparing people as best we could. A lot of the cities we visited had a network. Churches, community centers, college campuses. That's where you found the most organization.

Most of the time, we already had a place to sleep and somewhere to give lessons before we even stepped into a city. There were a lot of ghosts to practice on. A lot of demons that were walking around with their black eyes like it was nothing. We helped people with their ghosts, helped people with their demons.

 _[Interviewer: How many people were you in charge of?]_

Listen to you. 'In charge of', like I was running a company or something.

I helped coordinate a lot of people. A lot of different people and organizations. We were trying to spread the word as quickly as we could. There wasn't any time left, this was the last moment we had to make sure it wasn't a complete slaughter.

Suzanne and I moved around a lot, and we made sure that we were always talking, always teaching.

Chris found us after he'd left Dean. It was good to see that boy again, it made Suzanne happy. She embarrassed the heck out of him, with all her fussing.

He gave me a little leather pack, something Dean had given to him. When I opened it, there was a can of salt, some charms and a note.

 _[Interviewer: What did the note say?]_

I memorized it, I read it so many times. I couldn't make sense of it at first.

It said, "Family is the only thing that matters. Don't go after Sam. Do what I taught you."

 _[Interviewer: What does that mean?]_

Dean taught us to hunt demons. Sam wasn't a demon.

 _Thomas Moretti:_

After Ellen gave us the warning that there were professionals after Dean, we immediately began taking precautions.

We set up a perimeter, we began patrolling more regularly, and most importantly, we limited the contact that Dean Winchester had with the outside world. Dean was still our CO, and he still determined our missions, but we made sure that the only people coming in or out of the camp were friendlies.

But Dean was a soldier. He was used to fighting. He didn't like the sidelines. When one of our recon units reported strange weather patters around a seal in Nebraska, Dean was on the first Hummer out there. We knew it could be a trap, but it was also the first sign anyone had seen of Lilith in a while.

 _Ruby:_

It was one of the underground that gave away their cunning plan. Sam had put two demons in members of the underground so that he was in touch with their movements. He was actually keeping them safe, a lot of the time.

One of the members, Chris something, had heard that real hunters - old school hunters, not these new-age post-Las-Cruces hunters – wanted to kill Dean, and that their plan was to track what he was tracking and get there before he did. Dean was tracking Lilith, so the hunters were tracking Lilith, and we decided that the best way to draw them out would be to fake a Lilith sighting.

We'd figured out pretty easily that the angels had no idea that Lilith was in Hell, which made our job easier.

Rarzel wasn't the same strength as Lilith, but if he showed up and made some strange weather, Dean would think he was. It was a solid plan. The trick was to take out the heavy hitters – the old school hunters who wanted Dean dead - before we drew them in. Vicki and Terrence were still with the FBI, so Sam told them to get Bobby out of the way.

 _[Interviewer: Sam's friend Bobby?]_

Bobby was probably the only one left who could pull one over on Dean or Sam. And I think Sam was pissed that Bobby wanted to kill Dean. Sam always loved Dean.

 _[Interviewer: What do you mean?]_

Don't you want to hear about the explosions yet? This Lifetime crap is the most boring part of the story.

 _Vicki:_

I've played games of Solitaire that were harder than setting Bobby Singer up for the April Attacks. No really, have you ever tried that Solitaire that comes with Windows? It's hard!

We were set to raid his house, and if we were lucky, catch the psychic and Pete Osgood, too. Right around when we started fabricating witnesses just for fun, I got a phone call from this demon I knew from way back in the fourth century. He'd been dancing about joining Sam, and Terrence and I had bets going on whether he would or wouldn't.

He said he wanted to meet Winchester, and if I could arrange that, it'd be worth our time. I called Ruby, we set up a time, and when we all stood around the crossroads, the guy said that he knew where Lilith was. If Sam wouldn't kill him, he'd tell him.

Sam says, okay, okay, I won't kill you, where is she? Hell, even I believed he wouldn't back off of that promise. He was a goody-two-shoes looking kid, even with all that power. So the demon explains that Lilith's in the safest place she knows: Hell.

It's the only place Sam can't catch her, and it's the only place she has the ultimate upper hand.

Sam smiled and then reached out and killed the demon dead. He said, completely straight faced as the demon's host screamed his head off, "That's what she thinks."

I can't even remember his name – the demon's. It wasn't that important, I guess.

 _Ruby:_

Before we played cavalry to Dean's Alamo, we knew where Lilith was, but we didn't have any idea how to get there. You'd have to unlock Hell's Gate to get into Hell, and even that wouldn't work because she'd probably have traps set up. Our best bet was to blast a new doorway into Hell.

Doing that... I don't know if there's anyone on Earth that could do that. The angels couldn't even do that. When Castiel rescued Dean, he used the front door, fought his way past the hordes and reached out to shove Dean back onto Earth. Blasting a new door into Hell?

That's like saying that you want a faster way to China, so you decide to blow a hole through the middle of the planet to get there.

Thing is, I knew Sam would do it.

None of that was important to Sam, though. Screw the mission, he wanted his brother safe.

Rarzel raised some unusual weather, and we waited. The psychic didn't have a chance. I think Rarzel disemboweled her. Osgood, we didn't find at first. He was good at his job and he'd had a lot of practice hiding from demons.

 _Vicki:_

Ruby? Ruby was fucking insane. She was not just a color short of a Crayola box, she had no crayons at all in her box. She was out of Crayolas, and didn't seem to know it.

She'd put this bug in Sam's ear about blasting his way into Hell, like it'd be that easy if he could just find the right location. That was more than insane. Here she was, talking about wanting an Earth free of Hell, and she wanted to break down the walls between Earth and Hell.

Crazy, like I said.

Not that we'd ever say anything. We were all smarter than that. You say something about Ruby and Sam could melt you faster than you can say, "Kidding."

 _Ellen Harvelle:_

Dean drove off, and I had one thought in my mind: I had to convince Bobby that it was a bad idea to kill Dean. I had to make him see that Dean wasn't the enemy here.

I loaded up my van, told Jo to call me with any news, and then I headed towards his house.

 _Robert Singer:_

Of course it makes sense. Dean saved Jo's life. Without him, she'd be dead.

I'm not mad at Ellen for her choice, it was hers to make, and it makes a heck of a lot of sense that she'd choose to stick with him. But that doesn't change what the plan was.

I told Pete flat out, I wasn't going to shoot Dean. That doesn't change what I did do.

I still did my part. And saw him and Pam off. Pete was going to shoot Dean, he was going to use a sniper rifle to do it. And if that didn't work, Pam was going to summon up some demons that would do that job.

I gave her the names. The demons that would give even the angels some pause.

 _Jim Novak:_

I think that Pete Osgood got off one shot before Sam pushed him off a building with his mind. One shot, and then Sam shoved him off a building. I don't know how he survived that.

 _Mary Bishop:_

I wasn't even a demon, and I could see that the plan was BS. Rarzel thought that Sam had lost his mind. Sam's plan was to use his brother as bait, spring the resistance's trap and then take them out before they could kill Dean. Part of it was Sam relying on the fact that the soldiers Dean had recruited were worth their salt in a fight. The other part was that Sam thought he could do anything.

Ruby'd told him that he could blast a hole into Hell with his brain, and he thought that he could do that. Taking out a few humans? Not a problem, in Sam's opinion.

By the time we go to Oklahoma, Sam was antsy, afraid that Dean would get there before he did. He was right. We pulled up, and saw that there was already Hummers in the center of town, drawing a huge demon trap. I guess Dean was smart enough to know that a standard devil's trap wouldn't hold Lilith.

We were about to start searching the surrounding buildings for the guys trying to kill Dean, when we heard the shot. Even Ruby couldn't stop Sam. He headed straight for his brother, one hand out.

 _Ruby:_

Sam's hunted for a long time, he knew where he'd be if he was going to take out Dean.

It wasn't anything psychic. Just experience.

 _[Interviewer: Is it true that you tried to stop Sam?]_

Why would I do that?

 _Jackson:_

We almost killed that fucktard when he came running towards us. We'd set up a perimeter, and were going over the area to determine where Lilith could be when this guy came running towards us.

If Dean hadn't started towards him when he did, Sam would have been red mist, you hear what I'm saying?

Right when Dean got to him, we heard the shot. The unit on guard duty was already firing at the sniper when we saw the guy fly off a rooftop. And then if that wasn't strange enough, Dean - who didn't even like it when his girl touched him in public – goes all faggy on us and starts crying and hugging his brother.

Fucking awkward, if you ask me.  
 **Chapter 11: Off Into The Sunset**

 _Ruby:_

 _They hadn't seen each other in months. And before that it was always them fighting with each other. I know a lot of the guys there said it was 'gay' or whatever – the verdict from the boys who don't ask, don't tell, but apparently give interviews._

 _None of them want to admit that they'd probably do the same thing if they'd been handed the shit sandwich the Winchesters were. A little boy-on-boy action wasn't that surprising._

 _Dean was letting Sam patch him up and they couldn't stop hugging each other. It was a Care Bear convention in that room._

 _Finally, they started talking about the war and I thought that it'd be business as usual, Sam on one side, Dean on the other, but maybe being almost getting shot by people who he thought were on his side gave Dean a little bit of perspective because he asked us what we thought was going on._

 _I told him what we knew: Lilith had stationed herself in Hell because it was easier to run things when you didn't have to worry about angels and Sam trying to kill you. And I told him about the doorways of Hell being shut._

 _The souls... I don't think he knew about that. I don't think the angels did, either. Castiel looked pretty surprised. Because Hell was locked tight to anyone who wasn't on Lilith's side, the souls had started backing up, we were getting a lot more ghosts and poltergeists out here on Earth._

 _"I thought it was because more people were dying violently," Dean said. Both he and Sam looked a little like I'd just kicked them in the nuts._

 _  
_Jim Novak:_   
_

I think the angels thought that the smell of the dead, rotting souls was just how humans smelled. They had these weird ideas about humans.

 _Joanna Beth Harvelle:_

 _Ruby had been keeping secrets. She was a demon, it wasn't surprising._

 _A lot of the guys wanted to shoot her on sight, and I was pretty proud of that; we'd trained 'em well. She told us why we were going through two or three ghosts a day. I'd been out in the field with some of the units and it was intense. There were more ghosts than people on the ground, some days._

 _From what we understood, Lilith was in Hell, and there wasn't any way in for us, unless we could break our way in._

 _Dean was dead set against it. He said that they'd unlocked that gate once, and they were still cleaning up the mess._

 _"When do you think Lilith got out?" he asked Sam. "When Jake unlocked the Hell's Gate, she got loose, and it was our damn fault then, too."_

 _Sam said that they didn't have any choice. That the only way to end it was to kill off Lilith._

 _It was weird that they weren't fighting. The last time I'd talked to Bobby, it sounded like they were at each other like tomcats all the time. They were just talking to each other, easy. And Dean wanted to buy what Sam was saying, even I could see that. He wanted to work with Sam._

 _Finally, Castiel weighed in. The rest of us were just extras. Me, the soldiers, even Sam's demons. But Castiel and Ruby, they mattered._

 _Castiel said that he could close the hole behind them. Hell was built by Heaven, he said. He could repair what they broke. Then he asked Dean if Dean was only willing to sacrifice himself on Earth. Direct hit._

 _Dean wasn't suicidal, trust me, but he was willing to die for this, die to save us. He was willing to die for us, but he was _eager_ to do almost anything for Sam. He even wanted to buy into this plan, for Sam._

It was like, as soon as Castiel agreed with Sam, Dean couldn't wait to kick down Hell's door, guns blazing. And he had an idea about how to do it, too.

 _Ellen Harvelle:_

It killed me to watch Bobby get taken by the feds, but I didn't know what else to do. If I could have gotten him out, I would have, but by the time I got to his house, they'd already kicked down the door. They'd already shot his dogs.

Bobby Singer is a great man, and if any of you had known what he did, you would have done the same thing. I turned around and headed back to Dean.

 _Tom Moretti:_

It was a bad plan. I cannot stress that enough. It was a bad plan.

FUBAR.

It was more than FUBAR. But, I had my orders. I took the truck back to base camp and I loaded the bomb into the bed, then I went to look for Tina Ryder. She was working in the mess.

I hadn't ever met her before Dean asked me to bring her to the seal. She was cute. Thin. Didn't have a lot of meat on her bones.

Dean said that she'd know what we needed to know.

 _[Interviewer: What happened?]_

She was unwilling to assist in the mission, so I forcibly removed her and cuffed her to the truck. She didn't talk until we got to the seal. That was maybe a five hour drive? Then she saw Dean and started freaking out, told him that she wouldn't, that she didn't want to.

He said that there wasn't any other way. I uncuffed her and she tried to run, but Castiel was in front of her. He put his fingers right here and here on her face, and when she turned around the lights were on, but no one was home.

 _Jim Novak:_

I've been trying to tell you. Angels aren't nice. They're warriors.

He saw what Tina had inside her head and he opened it up so that they could use it. Dean needed a bomb, Castiel got him one. Angels don't care about people on a one-on-one scale. We're so small to them. He didn't care what he had to do to Tina to get what they needed.

 _[Interviewer: Wasn't Castiel concerned about Dean's plan?]_

Castiel? Why would he be? He knew that Dean would die for the cause. He made sure that Dean would be willing to die for the cause.

And they were so strong. You don't have any idea how strong Dean and Sam were. If they were fighting Lilith, they might just win. They just had to get into Hell first, and the best way was with the bomb.

 _Vicki:_

Morningstar save us from any plan that involves an angel.

I mean it. I couldn't believe that this was what it'd come to. Demons and angels working together.

Shit.

And it was still a bad plan. What if the angel couldn't do it? Then we'd be down _Sam Winchester_ and have a huge gaping hole into Hell.

Not to mention, they were using Lilith's own bombs. I don't know what the side effects are of using those, do you? They'd brainwashed an ex-host into doing it. Angel-fied her until she rebuilt it. It looked like it'd work, but that didn't mean that I wanted to be there to see it work.

Crazy fucking Winchesters.

 _Miranda Reyes:_

I'd been set up at Dean's camp, and I was interviewing like crazy, when they all got news that something big was going down. Soldiers can be on the move in less time than it takes for me to dry my hair in the morning. They headed to Oklahoma, and had enough ammo to take out a country.

All that was left after the soldiers headed out was the people that weren't soldiers, but were helping them. A lot of people that worked as cooks or coordinators. Some of the people that the soldiers called "hunters." It was a word that Dean used to say a lot in his sermons.

After everyone left, I was in the mess with Tina. Tina Ryder and I had become friendly with each other while we were in the camp, she was shy, but she was friendly with a lot of people high up in the camp. Ellen. Jo. Dean. I wanted to know what she knew, to be honest.

Tom came in and asked Tina to come with him. She never came back to the camp when the rest of them did. I didn't ask what happened to her until she was put on trial for the April Attacks. Which was a while later.

The world beyond Dean was crazy. When I called my producer about being embedded with Dean's troops, he said that even if that was true, the story wouldn't even hit the intro for any news show. Auto workers and airlines were on strike because they claimed that their jobs were being outsourced to demons. Rome had declared it the end times. Harrell had shut down the whole city of Phoenix and his people were all dressed in white gowns and praying on the streets.

I still told him I needed a real camera crew and a producer and he sent one over.

 _Ellen Harvelle:_

I got there just in time to see Tina blank out because of something Castiel did. Then she turned around and started working on that bomb. Whatever was going down, I already knew I didn't like it.

Dean pulled me aside and told me that he and Sam had a plan. To be honest, I don't know if I've heard scarier words that that, ever. He said that they were going to go find Lilith and make her pay.

"You mean stop her," I said.

And he said, "yeah," but it was like when I told Jo to clean out the storage closet, "yeah." A lie, but a good intentioned one.

I put my hands on Dean's face, and kissed his forehead. Don't know what he wanted from me, but he started crying a little, not sobbing or anything, but he was crying, blinking the tears. I wiped at them with my thumbs like I used to for Jo when she was younger.

Thing is, we knew what was happening. _I_ knew what was happening.

Dean had walked into Hell once; to do it again was suicide. This time he wouldn't have any angels who wanted to pull him out. He was crying, and maybe it looked like we were kissing or something from a distance, but I knew what he wanted was just this last little bit of weakness before he had to go back to being a Winchester.

I didn't tell him about Bobby, and he just kept silent. Those tears looked almost painful.

Eventually, Sam came up to the two of us and I handed Dean my handkerchief for his nose. They walked up to the bomb and Tina told them how to make it go off.

When Castiel let go of whatever he was doing, she screamed and collapsed again; it was just like the first time. She couldn't stop screaming.

Sam and Dean talked with each other quiet for a minute, then Sam told his people to back off, to get about five miles away. Dean told us the same. He said to go back to base camp and make sure the other teams were ok.

 _Jackson:_

We made sure we weren't going to be danger close when the explosion went off. Everyone wanted to stay with Dean, fight with him. He was the CO, he _was_ the fucking mission, for most of us.

Tina Ryder fucked off as soon as she could. Frankly, couldn't blame her. That was some fucked up shit she'd had to do, and she hadn't even signed up for it.

We stayed in base camp for a week and then the younger Harvelle said that we could all go home, that we should keep our phones on in case we needed to be called up. That piece of tail had some balls, telling marines that shit. But, shit, I'd seen her take out a demon that would make you cry, so fuck it.

Some units kept hunting together, even after Harvelle said we could all go home. I mean, we were all AWOL according to the USA, so it wasn't that surprising that most guys didn't want to go back to their old COs and say, "Hey, the war with Hell is over, I'm ready to go back to the fucking desert and kill hajis."

At least I think it's over. Harvelle says we'll never know for sure.

 _Ruby:_

I got everyone to that abandoned farmhouse we'd stayed in. And then we waited. There wasn't really any way to tell if we won, just if we lost.

 _[Interviewers: People say that you and Sam talked before you left. What did he say?]_

None of your business.

 _[Interviewer: What happened next?]_

I don't know. That's it, that's the end.

Dean and Sam walked into Hell. And we all haven't died yet. I'd assume they won.

 _Bobby Singer:_

I have no idea what happened to those boys. I got a letter from Ellen a while back; she said that they went out fighting, and that the seals left over were rock solid.

Don't know if that's a win. It's somethin'.

 _Miranda Reyes:_

After all this? I got my own show on CNN. "The Now Hour." You've seen the promos. Haven't heard from Tom or Jackson. I think Jackson went home to his family, Tom I haven't heard from.

Did you ever get a hold of him?

 _Tina Ryder:_

I lasted about a week on my own before the FBI caught me in New York. I was put on trial for participation in the April Attacks and sentenced to five consecutive life sentences.

I know that the other guy they caught – Singer. Robert Singer. He got only three life sentences for it, and twenty years for the illegal weaponry at his house.

 _Pete Osgood:_

I was never tried for anything. After I... After. I got taken to the hospital and they managed to save my legs, but I'll never be able to walk again, too much spinal damage.

I hear occasionally from other hunters. News is that Jo and Ellen are on the run, I've heard from a couple people that they haven't been able to shake the cops' interest.

Pam's dead. Got killed by a demon when we attempted to kill Dean.

Bobby's in prison on some trumped-up charges.

 _Hannah Jones:_

Well, I'm still working, hon. Why wouldn't I be?

There's still evil to fight, there's still people to save. Suzanne and Chris and I still have some life left in us. And I always remember what Dean wrote to me.

Family is the only thing that matters.

 

End


End file.
